The emptiness of outer space incites a surprising kind of yearning in Brittany Nelson. “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” her 2024 show at PATRON Gallery in Chicago, drew on her interests in science-fiction archives, travelogue videos, and early photochemistry techniques—all soundtracked by a heartrending Bonnie Raitt ballad that mines the desire in unrequited love (“I can’t make you love me if you don’t / you can’t make your heart feel something it won’t”).
Nelson’s engagement with the erotics of extraterrestrial subject matter was inspired by an unusual muse: the storied Mars rover, Opportunity. “I call her a lesbian icon,” the artist said, adopting the feminine pronoun that NASA attached to the robot during its 2004–18 service on the Red Planet. “She’s one of the farthest-roaming robots we’ve ever sent off-planet, and she took an insane amount of images,” Nelson told me when I visited her studio in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. “She was on an expedition alone, doing these butch rock experiments while [casting] glances across the landscape, which is an absolute lesbian trope: the longing glance, never to close the distance.”
To lend pathos to Opportunity’s images, Nelson printed composites of them using the bromoil process, an early 20th-century technique that gives photographs a more ethereal, painterly look. Source pictures from NASA “are so amazing but are only shared on science-y, techno-fetishy blogs,” she said, noting that they tend to be treated as data sets more than aesthetic entities. “I wanted to put the romanticism back in the images.”
She also found metaphorical resonance in more personal terms. Recalling her upbringing in a “cultural vacuum” in Montana, Nelson said, “I started thinking about having to reverse-engineer what it was like to be a gay person stuck in a very isolated environment. Then all of these parallels with space exploration and sci-fi became apparent.”
In her studio, secreted within a former military supply base dating back to World War I, Nelson works with a giant Fotar photo enlarger from the 1950s—“we call it Lord Fotar,” she said—that moves along floor tracks to project negatives, allowing for prints of formidable size. (Her largest so far is three by seven feet.) But she also works with other technologies: everything but the signature is me (2023) is a typewriter she programmed to type a single word—Starbear—culled from flirty letters exchanged by sci-fi writers Ursula K. Le Guin and Alice B. Sheldon, who wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr.
Nelson’s new work focuses on enormous telescope arrays, started as an artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute, a Silicon Valley–based nonprofit studying the presence of life and intelligence beyond Earth. Last year, she showed photographs of a telescope array in California in a two-person exhibition (with Joanne Leonard) at Luhring Augustine in New York. For a solo show next year at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, she is making work inspired by one of the world’s largest radio telescopes, at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. “I’m in the middle of it, struggling,” she said of her work in progress. “But I’m personifying the telescope in some way, almost treating it like an ex-girlfriend.”
On the second floor of a building in São Paulo suffused with sounds of the city and fumes from an auto shop below, Aislan Pankararu’s studio teems with reminders of his rural home in the sertão nordestino, Brazil’s northeastern hinterland. Leather hides sent by his father hang from the ceiling beside a bundled mass of dried croá stalks. Large paintings lean against the walls, marked by evocative abstractions and undulating lines that suggest subterranean networks of roots. Dots and plus signs in other works look like energy fields that radiate from nucleic cores (or “cellular universes,” as Pankararu called them during my visit).
Since moving to the city in 2021, Pankararu has maintained a dialogue with his more remote homeland through a practice that pulls from his studies in medicine, references to the flora and fauna of Brazil’s interior, and the charged ritual drawings of his people, the Indigenous Pankararu. (He adopted his surname to proudly acknowledge “an ancestral legacy that must be well cared for,” he said.)
Licensed as a physician after years of study in Brasília, Pankararu returned to his childhood love of drawing while completing his medical residency in 2019. Just a few weeks before the outbreak of Covid-19, he opened an exhibition of drawings at the Hospital Universitário de Brasília, where he worked. By the end of 2021, Pankararu had appeared in 10 more shows, and he has since participated in exhibitions at the Museu Nacional da República in Brasília and Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Last year, he received the prestigious PIPA Prize, which celebrates emerging Brazilian talent.
Pankararu’s subdued color palette evokes northeastern Brazil’s Caatinga biome, where dry shrubs and thorny trees are gestural marks against the sepia tones of sandy earth. The environment is deeply entwined with Pankararu culture. “There is no Pankararu calendar without the Caatinga,” the artist said of his people’s relationship with the seasonal cycles of different plants.
In a series of works titled “Soil” (2024), painted in clay-pigmented acrylic, Pankararu blurs micro- and macroscopic views while evoking cell membranes, wave forms, arboreal growth rings, and topographic maps. In his “Touch” series (2024), white and black dots vibrate over planes that peel from raw linen to reveal a russet-painted ground. Other works like A Redescoberta (The Rediscovery, 2024) burst with energetic colors such as fuchsia, violet, and green—not unlike a landscape springing to life after summer rains.
Pankararu’s technique of painting with clay also alludes to the Toré, a ceremonial dance for which performers’ bodies are covered in emblematic designs. Painting his canvases as he might a dancer’s skin, he evokes a feeling of movement and aligns his work with sacred ritual—but more suggestively than directly, so as to maintain a sense of secrecy essential to Pankararu tradition. “There is a mystery called silence,” he told me, “and I will walk hand in hand with it.”
Faye Wei Wei’s ethereal figurative paintings made a splash as early as 2016, when she graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Especially on Instagram, her self-image and romantic visions—full of motifs of hearts, lovers, flowers, bows, and rosaries—introduced a sort of fantasy painter unburdened by fear of external judgment.
Ready for a change after notable shows at Situations in New York and Galerie Kandlhofer in Vienna, Wei Wei enrolled last year in the MFA program at Yale. During a recent visit to her studio in New Haven, Connecticut, the floor was covered with book pages and image references, along with a pair of halved baseballs with fluffy guts, a clay model of an imagined city, a doll’s bed, and other found objects and sources of inspiration. “They are not necessarily any messes or obstacles—they are there for me to walk through,” she said of the disarray that doubled as a portal for improvisation and transformation.
In one of her recent paintings, Calcium Stars (severed romanesque ears), from 2024, streams of confetti exude from three floating ears above a figure reclining mischievously, undressed and in an ambiguous state between ecstasy and dread. The ears are loose studies of Romanesque sculptures that, in Wei Wei’s poetic imagination, serve as an invitation for whispered secrets. “I love architectural creatures, forms that exist as spaces rather than just objects,” she said, adding that the ears also reference a scene in Wong Kar-Wai’s film In the Mood for Love (2000). “There’s this idea [in the movie] of digging a hole in a tree and whispering secrets into it. I love the motif of hidden messages through storytelling.”
A Telescope Made of Champagne Glass (2024) features a resting figure surrounded by miniature architectural forms made to look like lace floating against a vibrant orange plane. “I was experimenting with texture in this piece, using a sponge,” Wei Wei said. “I think of paint almost like a substance with its own value, like music. It carries deep emotion.”
Expressive brushwork filled with musical energy—lively staccato notes, flowing legato melodies—sweep across many of her paintings. “In music, you have structure, like a sequence or a movement, and I think painting can mirror that,” she said. In A Theatre on the Moon (2024), long, fluid strokes cloud the bell of a trumpet that turns into a sort of tempest, as if excavating the interior space of the instrument while activating its sonic charge on the canvas.
Looking at Wei Wei’s work, one can feel both bewildered and beholden. It envelops you at once in the viewpoint of a performer on an instrument as well as that of an audience member peering at the same performance on stage. In that way, her style evokes a multiverse where painterly gestures, like music, play on emotions that can range from stoic to melodramatic, whimsical to melancholic, and slightly antiquated to refreshingly modern.
On the eve of Justin Allen’s live reading to celebrate his debut book, Language Arts (2024), published by Wendy’s Subway, we gathered over tea at a boutique café on New York’s Lower East Side. Just a few blocks away, at Performance Space, the writer, artist, and musician would soon recite his poem “140 BPM”—a sonic reenactment of nights spent at Bushwick’s Bossa Nova Civic Club—in a deep, resonant bass, mirroring the frenetic energy of bodies moving to techno. Language Arts manages to capture that energy in a book, merging music, dance, performance, and language to capture the reverberations of sound off walls. All the while, he transforms thunderous lyrics into leftist critiques: “We don’t get paid / until next Friday and / our rent is due / tomorrow.”
Allen grew up in the suburbs of Northern Virginia, where he began performing after discovering tap and hip-hop dance in his adolescence, and having inherited his father’s diverse music tastes, which spanned Parliament-Funkadelic to Green Day’s Dookie. As a high schooler, he encountered experimental punk bands that pushed his musical boundaries, and found solace in the chaotic fever dreams of the Blood Brothers and in the loose expressive rhythms of Saetia, which draws on jazz.
But it was Allen’s move to York City that would shape his political consciousness. In the city, the artist was immersed in the world of indie sleaze artists like Santigold and M.I.A. He found in their music a framework for critiquing the United States. “It was a weird moment when everyone was scared for different reasons,” he reflected. “Whenever people are scared, interesting things happen in culture.” In Language Arts, these “interesting things” take the form of text filled with sci-fi-inspired scenes, speculative essays, and “Hatnahans”—a language Allen created himself.
Creating a language is no small feat, but for Allen, it was second nature. An aspirational polyglot—having tried his tongue at French and Spanish—he discovered David J. Peterson’s The Art of Language Invention (2015) at the Strand bookstore near Union Square. After studying indigenous African languages like Zulu and Xhosa on YouTube, he began to craft a language of his own. Hatnahans has open vowels, genderless words, and an invented alphabet.
But the ethos of Language Arts is as punk as it is academic. Lyrics and notes from his band, Black Boots, are scattered across fluorescent green pages, infusing the work with the irreverence of club culture. In his opening essay, “Into the City,” Allen presents a manifesto for the imaginary island of Hatnaha, blending urban life and nature in a vision of creative and ecological harmony. It conveys a sense of buoyancy, describing a luscious tropical climate surrounding a vibrant city center unspoiled by infrastructure issues and imperialism. Moving between these climes, at its core Language Arts creates a world as fluid as the languages we speak.
Within Rhea Dillon’s studio cubicle at the Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP), the artist and writer talked quietly about preparations for three exhibitions, opening weeks apart over the summer: her ISP group exhibition; a solo show at the Heidelberger Kunstverein; and a booth in the Statements section of Art Basel Switzerland. Famed for Marxist-leaning, theory-rich seminars, the ISP is a clear fit for the 29-year-old artist, who has temporarily transplanted from South London; her work engages a canon of Black and Caribbean historians, novelists, and poets including Kamau Brathwaite, Beverley Bryan, June Jordan, and Sylvia Wynter.
A second-generation British citizen with family in Jamaica, the artist often draws from her correspondence with the Caribbean, and critiques the sociopolitical ceilings inherited with diasporic identity. Sculptures such as Caribbean Ossuary (2022)—included last year in “Tituba, qui pour nous protéger?” (Tituba, who protects us?) at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris—suggest an immigrant’s aspirational longing for Old World luxury. The work presents a mahogany cabinet, echoing one owned by the artist’s grandmother, tipped on its back and seeming to float like a ship across the gallery floor. Within, items from a cut-crystal tea service (for when “the queen came”) hover atop a mirrored backing.
Dillon often produces sculptures like this one, crafting visceral portraits of postcolonial Black experiences from everyday objects, symbols, and language. Reflecting on her work’s territorial politics, Dillon said, “I think about land very physically now—soil, as opposed to geographies or trajectories,” citing American anthropologist Vanessa Agard-Jones.
Dillon’s 2024 exhibition “An Alterable Terrain” at Tate Britain bridged the body and its diaspora through fauna. She presented a fragmentary Black woman, abstracted in a sparsely arranged constellation of sculptures representative of eyes, mouth, lungs, hands, feet, and reproductive organs. In Swollen, Whole, Broken, Birthed in the Broken; Broken Birthed, Broken, Deficient, Whole—At the Black Womb’s Altar, At the Black Woman’s Tale (2023), dried calabash gourds are mounted on an angled plinth of sapele mahogany; some fractured, some whole, they stand in for womb, breasts, and vagina. Dillon calls out the commodity equivalence slavery drew between human flesh and wood, and underlines the parallel migrations of Black people and plant life.
Complementing her theoretical rigor with “poethics” (per the artist, borrowing poet Joan Retallack’s term), Dillon imbues her artworks with linguistic slippages and nonsensical evasions. Dillon’s writing favors elision and repetition, the latter shaping sections of her libretto for Catgut—The Opera, performed at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2021. Pointing to photographs in her studio, Dillon explained this linguistic approach through a series of drawings central to “Gestural Poetics” at Paul Soto Gallery in Los Angeles last year. Originating when Dillon learned that “spade” was a racial slur, the oil stick drawings repeatedly rehearse the contours of the playing card icon, distorting the derogatory expression into a tree, a shield, or a pair of breasts. Looking over the recurrent symmetries of her drawings, the artist wondered, “Can I extend a definition? Or can I create a new definition through repetition?”
When it’s business as usual in the United Nations General Assembly, debates over international laws and their global impact are coolly waged, their real-time minutes of interest largely to diplomats and reporters. But lately, these summits have gained an unexpected follower in Coumba Samba, an artist who is fascinated by the possibility of so many representatives of different nations gathered in one room. A livestream of these summits in 2024 even constituted a piece unto itself in Samba’s show at Empire, a tiny gallery in an office building located a 20-minute walk from the UN’s New York headquarters.
Within the UN, these emissaries’ words were of great importance, with the potential to impact the world more broadly. At Empire, their statements acted as background noise to the show, titled “Dress Code.” It consisted of little more than several poles, green carpeting, and the phones and speakers that played footage of live UN meetings. Samba procured the poles from construction companies, then painted them with colored bands of irregular sizes referring to national flags. One of them prominently featured red, white, and blue, which Samba said gestured toward “colonial powers,” the flags of so many colonizer nations sharing these hues. “I’m interested in color and power,” Samba said when I met with her in New York.
Samba has exhibited canvases as well as found objects— wooden pallets, discarded radiators—painted in hues that pay homage to highly specific yet sometimes elusive sources. Stripe Blinds (2023), for example, is a broken set of Venetian blinds whose slats were painted lime green, mustard yellow, and gray, the colors of an ensemble Samba’s sister wore during her modeling days. But without these sentimental details, the work can feel cold and impersonal. In converting these stories into the ostensibly universal language of abstraction, all the intimacy is lost.
That’s deliberate. Samba’s interest in the way things get lost in translation derives from her transnational lifestyle. Born in Harlem, she was raised in Senegal for 5 years before her family returned to New York; she now splits her time between that city and various European hubs, including Basel, where, in September, she will show new work at the Kunsthalle. Shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic, she said, has allowed her to observe what she called a “cause-and- effect” phenomenon, referring to trash: The refuse of European nations commonly washes up on the shores of African nations like Senegal.
A 2024 solo show at London’s Arcadia Missa featured a set of wall-mounted radiators that Samba painted in monochromes, so that they resembled the squares and rectangles one might associate with Russian Suprematist painting. The Russian connection was deliberate: An accompanying booklet featured an essay by dealer Mischa Lustin addressing what he called “red gas,” or the petroleum exported from Russia to warm homes around the world. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine resulted in sanctions on oil, Lustin pointed out, and a European energy crisis ensued. Samba’s radiators may have been monochromatic, but they were “not supposed to be complete abstraction,” she said. Instead, they spoke to global supply chains, both material and ideological.
Libasse Ka’s paintings offer inventive solutions to thoroughly painterly problems. Take an untitled canvas from 2025, which features a dark silhouette of an umbrella that Ka painted on a piece of newspaper and then pressed onto the surface of his canvas, transferring the image before throwing the newspaper away. Painting the umbrella directly on the canvas “would have been too literal,” he explained when I visited his Brussels studio.
Ka’s works, with their pale surfaces, are mostly abstract, though oscillate between free gestures and recognizable forms—an umbrella, a car, a human in silhouette wielding a hammer, etc. They vary in size, with recent works tending toward larger canvases.
Ka’s unconventional approach took root in direct opposition to his training. He moved from Senegal to Belgium in 2010, and enrolled briefly in an art school in Brussels in 2019—L’École nationale supérieure des arts visuels de La Cambre. But he left after just a few months, frustrated by its rigid conservatism.
Then, in 2023, his career took an unexpected turn while he was working at an electronics store, where he encountered the Colombian artist Oscar Murillo. Murillo recognized Ka’s talent immediately from images of paintings that the young artist showed on his phone, and offered him a stipend to paint full-time, allowing him to quit the electronics job and hone his practice. This connection led Ka to Vanessa Carlos, founder of Carlos/Ishikawa gallery in London, who soon began representing him.
Soon, Ka was exhibiting internationally, and last October at Art Basel Paris, Carlos/Ishikawa gave him a solo booth. This year, his first institutional solo will open at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Belgium.
When I visited Ka’s palatial apartment-studio in Brussels, I noticed painting and art books littering every surface. As he spoke about influences, he hesitated at my note-taking. “I don’t want to seem derivative,” he admitted. While echoes of Cy Twombly, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Sigmar Polke may be present, Ka’s paintings are more than the sum of their constitutive parts: They are chaotic yet fertile spaces for the emergence of something new and unexpected.
His studio was filled with large canvases dominated by shades of gray and beige. Yet despite their restrained palette, they each contain a rich diversity of marks and textures. Ka gestured toward a sticky, yellowed splotch on one painting and said, “it’s varnish,” inviting me to touch it. I could barely contain my exhilaration as I ran my hand over his work: His obviously tactile paintings are begging to be touched.
A series of drawings spread across his floor provided further insight into his thinking. One sketch depicted a knight driving a lance through a dragon, while a small cameraman lurked in the margins. “It changes the way you see it, right?” Ka chuckled. “Suddenly, it’s not just a battle—it’s a film set.” This subtle disruption of perception is present in his paintings too. There, Ka subtly responds to the omnipresence of the camera in modern life, imposing something both rugged and methodical instead—a refreshing contrast to the slick scroll of the social media feed.
As an artist and academic, I’ve spent a lot of time considering what the point of making art is, and arguing with friends and colleagues about it. All the common refrains in this debate—that art is about beauty, cultural visibility, etc.—ring hollow against the overwhelming fact central to Maura Brewer’s practice: that art is, perhaps more than anything else, a tool for money laundering.
Brewer, who is based in Los Angeles, works primarily in video, creating essayistic compositions out of public records, found footage, text messages, drawings, and animations. She began working on the subject of money laundering in 2018, when she took an interest in the films of little-known director Jess Bond, formerly Jessica Manafort—the daughter of Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign adviser convicted of money laundering in 2019, and pardoned by Trump in 2020.
Brewer’s 2021 work Private Client Services shows exactly how money laundering works, making profit from criminal activity difficult to trace or appear to come from legal sources. The performance and video follows the artist as she attempts to launder money herself, by acquiring an artwork. This led to Offshore (2024), a video that premiered in Brewer’s breakout exhibition at the Canary Test in Los Angeles last year. A “how-to” guide for artists interested in navigating the world of global finance, Offshore is a poignant and wry meditation on the well-established link between global art prices and income inequality—particularly as they impact working-class artists. We follow her to various locations such as Ugland House, a building in the Cayman Islands that is home to 18,857 corporate entities, and the Geneva Freeport, which houses billions of dollars in untaxed art. She snorkels, eats fondue, and “learns how to set up an international corporate architecture to cover my tracks,” as she put it when I visited her studio.
Brewer is currently working on a project titled Leverage, which explores various dynamics between debtors, creditors, and that which cannot be repaid. The first chapter of this video project, recently on view at Timeshare Gallery in Los Angeles, is a portrait of prominent investor, art collector, and MoMA trustee Daniel Sundheim told through the story of his art-backed loans. We see Sundheim, as Brewer explained, “using his art collection as collateral for loans, which he used to buy more art, which, in turn, became collateral for more loans, and so on.” As part of her research for these works, Brewer has been working full-time as a private investigator for three years. But she interweaves this expertise with humor to highlight the absurdity of financial machinations, as well as their palpable effects on artists’ lives.
In January, Brewer lost her apartment and most of her belongings to the Eaton Fire. Such sudden and devastating loss highlighted for her how both money and art have become untethered from actual physical objects. If art and money, as she describes them, are both “dematerialized social constructs,” where does that leave those of us for whom everyday existence remains urgently material?
For people of a certain age, the title of this essay may call to mind Gabriel García Márquez’s novel Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), a narrative of age-defying and undying love that endures even in moments of catastrophe. Without claiming Márquez’s storytelling magic, I am borrowing his evocative title to reflect on a different kind of endurance: the persistence—and precarity—of writing art history in times of war.
For those of us engaged with the Islamic world, war is not a passing crisis but a persistent condition, predating Márquez’s novel and continuing, uninterrupted, to the present. The modern history of the Islamic world, like much of the formerly colonized Global South, has been punctured by armed conflict. Colonial conquests of the 19th and early 20th centuries reconfigured societies, economies, and cultural life. And the end of colonial rule brought no peace: postcolonial states unraveled into civil wars, territorial disputes, and neocolonial interventions.
My own life has unfolded in the shadow of war—from the 1956 Suez Crisis and the 1967 Arab defeat, to the wars in Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and, today, Syria, Libya, Sudan, alongside the festering open wound of Palestine and the ongoing Israeli genocide against Gaza. These wars have left indelible psychological and identitarian scars while ensuring the prolonged entanglement of former colonizers in the governance and resource control of postcolonial states.
But my aim is not to invoke a revisionist history as catharsis, nor to offer the consoling illusion that history writing can resist genocide or erasure—though in moments of despair, such a belief is seductive. Rather, I want to explore how war has shaped the formation, orientation, and theoretical entrapments of the field of Islamic art and architectural history since its inception. This is a causal context rarely examined but fundamental to understanding how “Islamic art” evolved as a Western scholarly endeavor, beginning with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and extending into our present moment under the banner of the protracted, so-called “War on Terror.”
OF COURSE, THE LINK between war and history writing predates modern colonialism. In fact, the whole enterprise of history writing (or perhaps more accurately, history reciting) in the ancient world came about around heroic, nation-defining wars. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, and the Islamic genre of Maghazi literature all establish conquest and armed struggle as narrative origins. War is not just a historical event but the engine of historical consciousness, framing the very act of historiography. Likewise, art has long been implicated in war: as booty, as spoil, and as symbol.
Take the “Griffin of Pisa,” a monumental Islamic bronze likely made in al-Andalus or Islamic Sicily. Most probably captured during Pisan raids in the 12th century, it was proudly mounted on the cathedral roof in Pisa before being transferred to a museum in 1828 once its artistic value was recognized. Or consider the Baptistère de Saint Louis, a Mamluk basin of extraordinary craftsmanship. Though its origin is undisputed—Mamluk Egypt or Syria—its date of acquisition is unclear. It could have been any time between 1249, the date of Seventh Crusade in Egypt; and 1292, when al-Ashraf Khalil finally expelled the last Crusaders from Acre in Palestine. The basin was used in French royal baptisms beginning around 1606, and was later attributed, at the end of the 18th century, to Louis the 9th, or Saint Louis: a king defeated and captured by the Mamluks. Both maneuvers suggest an attempt to rewrite a history of humiliation into one of triumphant appropriation. All these cases illustrate how Islamic art was not simply acquired, but conscripted into Western narratives of power and prestige.
The European desire to possess Islamic objects grew tremendously during the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery, with the continent’s rising maritime power and its expansion into Asia and Africa. Early collectors acquired these objects by ostensibly ethical means: through trade, gift giving, bequests, or purchase.
But soon as colonial power penetrated the Islamic world in the late 18th century, extraction became the norm. European consuls, officers, scholars, and explorers—often operating under multiple guises—dug, bribed, purchased, or plundered their way through Islamic cities and antiquities markets. By the 19th century, museum collections in Europe—especially in London and Paris—swelled with artifacts acquired through unjust partition of archeological findings, plunder, and outright theft. Restrictive antiquities laws, introduced in the second half of the 19th century, slowed this flow but never reversed it.
World War I laid the entanglements of scholarship and imperialism bare. Figures like T.E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”) and Gertrude Bell began as archaeologists and emerged as colonial agents during the dismantling of Ottoman provinces at the end of the War. Lawrence played a dubious role in the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans. Bell influenced the shaping of modern Iraq, drawing its borders and choosing its king, before becoming the Director of Iraqi Antiquities and establishing the Iraq Museum in 1926. As director she drafted a new legislation that allowed the continued hemorrhaging of archeological finds outside Iraq, which she pushed against the opposition of the Arab nationalist minister of education, Sati’ al-Husri. Another early Islamicist, Louis Massignon, was arrested on suspicion of espionage in Iraq, only to reappear as a key advisor to the Sykes-Picot negotiators and to enter Jerusalem in 1917, alongside his friend Lawrence, with the British General Allenby, who started the process to fulfill the Balfour Declaration to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. K.A.C. Creswell, historian of early Islamic architecture, compiled a canon for the field while serving as Inspector of Monuments under General Allenby’s Occupied Enemy Territory Administration in Palestine and Syria in 1917-18.
THESE OVERLAPPING ROLES—archaeologist, soldier, administrator—tell us this: the very foundations of Islamic art history as a field are colonial. These foundations have had enduring consequences. Perhaps the most insidious is the field’s continued one-directionality, with one civilization observing, classifying, and interpreting the cultural production of another, as the latter remains largely excluded from the process.
This asymmetry persists today. With the exception of Iran and Turkey, and to a lesser extent Egypt, top academic positions, publications, and museum collections are centered in the West. Even as more scholars of Islamic background enter the field, the theoretical frameworks remain largely Eurocentric: the degradation of the classical heritage in the early Islamic period and the supposed prohibition of figural representation that led to abstraction are still syllabus staples. Local traditions of interpretation are rarely included and scholarship in Islamic languages is often dismissed as derivative or uncritical.
This imbalance is epistemological as much as institutional. The very notion of discovery, foundational to Western art history, is a prime example of this process. Islamic sites and artifacts were—and still are—declared “discovered” by Western scholars, as if they had previously been invisible or unknown. The implicit claim is not merely to first contact, but to first understanding. Even when local communities have revered, maintained, or interpreted these objects for centuries, their knowledge is framed as anecdotal, unsystematic, or lacking historical consciousness. Discovery, in this colonial schema, is not an encounter—it is a claim to epistemic authority.
The consequence of these claims to discovery is the erasure and belittling of indigenous interpretive frameworks—which are often labeled as intuitive, mystical, or uncritical. By contrast, Western modes of seeing are cast as analytical, dispassionate, rational, and implicitly, superior. This obfuscation robs local traditions of their historical agency and assigns meaning to their cultural output based on exogenous criteria. The act of “discovery,” then, functions not only as appropriation, but also as epistemic dispossession.
While this dynamic is not unique to Islamic art—it also affects African, Indian, Chinese, and pre-Columbian studies—it is particularly acute due to the political, historical, and civilizational entanglements between Europe and the Islamic world. Moreover, because Islamic art shares a lineage with the classical Mediterranean, its output is often framed as a detour from the presumed teleology of Renaissance and Modernity. Even within debates on Late Antiquity, Islamic art is often seen as derivative rather than generative, marginal rather than central. When historian Garth Fowden reminds us that “there are roads out of antiquity that do not lead to the Renaissance,” he reclaims a narrative space for Islamic continuity from Antiquity—a space often denied.
Denying indigenous interpretations means that religion—so central to understanding Islamic cultures—is often marginalized, with Islam frequently invoked only in introductory chapters, then quickly bracketed out. The deeper structures of Islamic belief—its influence on aesthetics, ethics, space, and meaning—are rarely engaged. One exception is the Perennialist school of philosophy, exemplified by the work of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, but their metaphysical readings are typically dismissed as ahistorical.
This reluctance to engage with Islam as a living worldview mirrors the secularism of post-Enlightenment Western epistemology, which still afflicts art history. The Islamic world, however, never underwent a comparable Enlightenment rupture with religion. Instead, certain secular ideas were absorbed and then filtered through religious sensibilities, resulting is a modernity deeply entangled with religion—which Western observers often find incomprehensible, particularly when Islamic symbols spark political protest. These moments of incomprehension reveal the limits of treating secularism as a universal model, and by extension, the secular art history’s inability to fully grasping Islamic visual culture.
This conceptual impasse is most visible in the historical amnesia surrounding 19th- and 20th-century Islamic art. Until recently, standard surveys simply ended before the onset of modernity. Scholars felt “uncomfortable in the 19th century,” to borrow a phrase from Islamic art historian Margaret Graves, because its eclectic artistic output challenged the dominant framework of rupture between the traditional and modern Islamic art. Accepting the creative continuity of Islamic art into the modern period would undermine the colonial narrative that depicted Islamic culture as static, in decline, and in need of European rescue. It would expose the “civilizing mission” for what it often was: a veneer for violence, looting, and epistemic conquest.
THE ETHICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL tensions haunting the modern study of Islamic art did not go wholly unnoticed, but acknowledgements by the likes of Oleg Grabar—perhaps the most influential figure in the field—stopped short of addressing their deep colonial roots. In an undated lecture draft he shared with me in the mid 1990s, Grabar reflected on the shifting landscape of Islamic art history and noted, with uncharacteristic unease, that “the most difficult to grasp change that was brought into the life of Islamic art in the last half-century is the importance taken by the contemporary world, its politics, the alleged sins identified with Orientalism, or the demands it made on all professionals.” Grabar saw that the field was no longer insulated from the political, ideological, and emotional ruptures of the present. Yet his phrasing—particularly “alleged sins”—betrays a certain ambivalence, if not reluctance, to fully reckon with the colonial entanglements that structured the very foundation of the discipline he helped shape.
Grabar’s observations were, nonetheless, astute. He recognized that “no one who has traveled or lived in Muslim lands can remain immune to the often very real emotional or cultural struggles which affect them. Algeria, Bosnia, Chechnya, Palestine, Kurdistan, Tajikistan, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Sinkiang, or the Sudan are all places where sad or tragic events have affected, or run the risk of affecting, the artistic heritage of these areas and, even more importantly, the education of men and women capable of learning about that heritage and of appreciating its products.” This is a powerful admission. Grabar acknowledges that political catastrophe does not merely damage monuments—it undermines the very possibility of local knowledge, of cultivating a generation of scholars from within the societies whose heritage is under study.
Yet what is striking—and telling—is that Grabar does not extend this diagnosis to the field itself. He expresses sympathy for those “affected” by war but not for how war—and the broader histories of colonialism and epistemic violence—may have shaped the structures, methods, and assumptions of the field he led. The impact of war, in his account, is circumstantial and external. What remains unacknowledged is that the condition of war—colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial—has not simply damaged the raw material of study, but has structured the very ways Islamic art has been discovered, defined, interpreted, and institutionalized in the West.
Later in the same reflection, Grabar turns his attention to the emergence of a new audience, a demographic shift he sees as transformative but somewhat unsettling. “We have now for the study of Islamic art and for all studies of the Muslim world, as for many other ethnic groups in North America, a new public seeking an awareness of the past different from the awareness expected in the countries from which their parents came and different from the allegedly universal scientific and academic scholarship of old. This has contributed tasks for which we are not, as a profession, well prepared and which we have not always handled very well.”
This is a candid admission, but it also reinforces the epistemological asymmetry under critique. Grabar recognizes the growing presence of diasporic and Muslim-identifying scholars, but he frames their expectations as burdensome “tasks” for a profession built around a different—implicitly Western—conception of the past. His phrase, “allegedly universal scientific and academic scholarship,” is telling. The term “allegedly” introduces doubt, but this doubt is not pursued. Grabar does not ask why the field had presumed such universality in the first place, nor does he suggest that the methodologies and categories inherited from Enlightenment Europe might require fundamental rethinking in light of this new public.
In effect, Grabar diagnoses the symptoms but avoids naming the underlying condition. His reflections acknowledge dissonance but hesitate to name its source: the field’s colonial origins, its exclusionary canon, and its secular epistemology. As someone who supervised more Muslim doctoral students than any of his contemporaries, he surely recognized the tensions faced by scholars straddling two traditions—one rooted in lived cultural experience, the other in Western academic detachment. But his proposed solutions were incremental and procedural, not structural or reparative.
What Grabar could not—or would not—see is that war has not merely interrupted the study of Islamic art; it has been a constitutive force in its development. The colonial and postcolonial wars that ravaged the Islamic world were not just the background conditions for scholarly inquiry—they were the very crucibles in which the field of Near-Eastern and Islamic art history was forged. From the Crusades to the Napoleonic expeditions, from the World Wars to the ongoing “War on Terror,” the discipline emerged alongside and often through the very violence that it now seeks to study.
The generational shift Grabar observed—of Muslim scholars seeking to reclaim and reinterpret their heritage—is not a burden on the field but an opportunity to reimagine its epistemic foundations. If, as Grabar wrote, “we are not… well prepared,” then the task is not simply to accommodate these voices but to rethink the assumptions, categories, and canons that have excluded them in the first place. Only then can we begin to disentangle Islamic art history from its colonial inheritance and make space for a pluralist, dialogical, and more impartial understanding of the past.
Nico Williams, a beadwork sculptor and member of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation in Tiohtià:ke (the area now known as Montreal), transforms glass beads into a sort of velvety substance. His work, which he calls “soft sculpture,” references everything from bingo cards and dice to caution tape and plastic fencing—all in a manner that embeds beauty in the banal.
By re-creating common objects, Williams comments in a way on materiality and its role in separating Native activists from sacred sites transgressed by pipelines. He also explores how materials foster connection, from “rez aunties” making an extra buck at bingo halls to different kinds of cultural preservation. Williams balances barbs aimed at socioeconomic forces with humor intrinsic to the act of beading gambling cards and IKEA bags for display in museums he couldn’t afford to visit as a child—with the hope of inciting what he called “booming Native laughter that shakes windows down the street.”
First exposed to beading by elders on his reserve (as reservations are known in Canada), Williams didn’t take up the practice until after departing at age 16. But like many contemporary Indigenous artists, he found it difficult to access his culture in urban environments, leading him to YouTube videos for self-education. Later, as an apprentice to Algonquin artist Nadia Myre, he traded help rebooting a car for training in beadwork. In 2021, during studies for his MFA at Concordia University in Montreal, Williams began approaching his craft from a more technical mindset after accepting an invitation to join the Contemporary Geometric Beadwork research team, and he has taught workshops at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he laughingly recalled mistaking for the Met and referred to as a “beading boot camp.” Of his work at MIT, he said, “I can’t do math—I just see.”
His experimental approach to beadwork is rooted in the principle of continuity. “We bead without knots,” he said. “The beads represent community—if you make a knot, that puts a knot in the community.” Early on, he explored his craft in small works like Starlite Variety (2021), a rendering of a shopping bag from a convenience store, and KD (2021), a yellow and blue beaded iteration of a Kraft Mac & Cheese box stitched into leather.
From these intimate consumerist effigies, Williams started making larger pieces mainly by accident after he intended to order 24 strands of orange beads but purchased 24 kilograms instead. That led to Barrier (2023), a large lattice of safety netting comprising orange bugle beads and three metal posts, and Biskaabiiyang | Returning to Ourselves (2023), a 73-foot-long hanging work fashioned like flaming caution tape. The pair of larger works evoke Inuit- and Métis-led “water protector” struggles in Canada around the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline and, for American viewers, the Oceti Sakowin–spearheaded Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2016.
Such works earned Williams the $100,000 Sobey Art Award in 2024 and led to “Bingo,” a momentous solo show at Phi Foundation in Montreal (on view through September 14) containing more than 30 works grappling with land sovereignty, pecuniary difficulties, and trade in Indian Country. All the while, Williams continues to reckon with the dissonance between the stark reality of the reserve and the surreal privilege of consumer culture—an intersection he captures in his transformations of everyday objects.