At New York’s recent Independent 20th Century art fair, a selection of works by four Arab women artists helped audiences appreciate the broader context of the last century’s canon.
Launched by art dealer Elizabeth Dee more than 15 years ago, Independent Art Fair has carved for itself a niche profile as a go-to destination for well-researched and thoughtfully orchestrated stands. This month saw the fourth iteration of Independent 20th Century, a sister fair that exhibits art from the last century with a sharp focus on the era’s overlooked creative voices. The fair returned to its usual venue, Casa Cipriani at the Battery Maritime Building in downtown Manhattan, for an edition that featured a remarkable representation of Arab women artists among its 31 exhibitors.
“I produce exhibitions for integration and expanding the canon,” Dee tells Canvas, “and the way to do this is to spotlight many overlooked artists and give them a platform in New York, the museum capital of the world.” She notes that reduced travel and shipping budgets among the museums are making art from remote geographies harder to come across in the city, pointing out how “working with estates and galleries allows these voices to be liberated from a singular context and a certain vantage point.”
Salon 94 joined the show with a three-woman exhibition of Dorothy Salhab Kazemi, Huguette Caland and Afaf Zurayk, Lebanese contemporaries with long-lasting impacts not only on modern Arab art but culture in general. Similarly bulbous and mysterious, Kazemi’s intriguing clay sculptures and Caland’s arresting paintings tied together the two late artists’ shared interest in the transcendental through the immediate reality of the body. Caland’s Accroupie (1979) is a boundless take on corporality in which sinuous forms on linen melt and ooze the body into a dream-like malleability. Spread across a long table, Kazemi’s modest-scale sculptures, also from the ’70s, morphed the body into an ecofeminist meditation, alchemising the unknown with the physical. Their penetrating presence was responded to by an ethereal abstraction by Zurayk, who still lives in Beirut, in which a wash of copper hue seeps into a dreamy blue.
“Caland broke taboos around the female body and sexuality decades before it was acceptable, with her practice forming a platform for culture migrating across continents, from her native Beirut to Paris to Los Angeles,” says gallery owner Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn. This autumn she will open a solo show of the artist’s rare late 1960s paintings, alongside later abstractions, at her Upper East Side townhouse gallery.
Dee – who admits to still discovering artists from the last two iterations of the Venice Biennale in 2022 and 2024 – notes that many of the twentieth-century Arab artists now garnering interest have come to attention through biennials and seminal group exhibitions held outside the United States. “Visibility here is, I think, the ultimate way for a deep and exponential impact on their careers,” she maintains, citing the Musée d’Art Moderne’s recent exhibition Arab Presences: Modern Art and Decolonisation. Paris 1908–1988 as an example of the connection to her fair’s institutional foundations. The Paris museum show, which presented more than 200 artworks from the Arab world, featured Caland as well as the Algerian artist Baya (born Fatma Haddad Mahieddine), who was the subject of Richard Saltoun’s stand in the Casa Cipriani. The London gallery’s orange-coloured presentation included Baya’s mystic blend of female figures and their abstracted surroundings, in which surreality and everyday rituals fall into a playful harmony. Femme à l’Oiseau [Woman with Bird] (1985) embodied the titular scenography with a fable-like vivacity in which the bird and the female figure co-exist in a physical and emotional similarity, while Maternity, plants, birds and houses (1984) illustrated a mother and her baby engulfed with a natural wealth in which all titular subjects surround them with a naive rhythm.
More widely, Dee is seeking to broaden out awareness and recognition of under-appreciated aspects of the twentieth-century canon. “We need to understand where the inequities come from,” she adds about the role played by art in establishing a better understanding of past and ongoing turmoils in the Arab world. Her fair’s tight but nuanced focus sought to help the New York audience ask questions about “how we got here” and to encourage museums to “preserve histories” with a wider consciousness and greater depth.
