Art & Culture

The Overlooked Women Behind Arab Modern Art

BYLeila Khatib

September 23, 2025

At first glance, the history of modern Arab art feels unfinished and most often framed through a handful of celebrated male artists canonized in textbooks and exhibitions. Yet just beneath that surface lies a parallel story, one that is only beginning to be written: the women whose practices were as radical as they were overlooked. Horizon in Their Hands: Women Artists from the Arab World (1960s–1980s), now on view at the Ithra Museum in Dhahran in collaboration with Sharjah’s Barjeel Art Foundation, takes on the task of filling that absence. With 50 artists represented, the exhibition reframes a formative era in Arab modernism, positioning these women’s legacies firmly within the region’s cultural memory.

For many of them, art was not cultivated through academies or formal institutions but in private studios, community workshops, and domestic spaces. In Saudi Arabia, Safeya Binzagr became the first woman to hold a solo exhibition in 1968, painting to preserve fading traditions. Mounirah Mosly experimented with palm fibers and copper, reclaiming overlooked materials to construct a new visual language. In Egypt, Inji Efflatoun’s canvases carried the urgency of political manifestos, while Morocco’s Chaibia Talal: self-taught and shaped by craft inspired by rural mythologies to craft exuberant compositions. Across the region, limited access to resources and training meant many women turned to what was at hand—craft traditions, natural pigments, and everyday materials—to define their practice.

Sheikha Ibrahim, Letter to Homeland, undated. Textile. Courtesy of Barjeel Art Foundation Collection, Sharjah..

A shared thread across these figures is their embrace of craft, long dismissed as utilitarian, relegated to the home and excluded from the category of fine art. Horizon in Their Hands exposes that hierarchy as both gendered and reductive. Tunisian pioneer Safia Farhat—at once a feminist politician and artist—redefined tapestry, elevating it from domestic ornament to modernist statement. Palestinian Vera Tamari worked in clay to narrate displacement and belonging, while the Wissa Wassef Art Centre in Egypt collapsed distinctions altogether, transforming weaving into a collective act of artistry. By reclaiming materials such as textiles, glass, brass, and clay, these women insisted that what was once confined to the home could also belong to the museum—that the domestic and the radical were not opposites but intertwined.

This act of reclamation was as much about space as it was about medium. If museums traditionally enshrined the monumental works of men, these women reframed the very definition of the museum by bringing the home into it. Their work blurred the boundaries between the intimate and the institutional, insisting that memory, identity, and resistance could be woven into a tapestry as forcefully as they could be painted onto a canvas.

The significance of Horizon in Their Hands lies in this act of documentation. It reframes Arab modern art with the impact of these female artists who are being exhibited together for the 1st time and articulating their own languages of identity, belonging, and renewal. “We have only touched the tip of the iceberg in terms of uncovering women’s contributions,” notes curator Rémi Homs. The exhibition is both archive and provocation that is a show of untold stories.

Vera Tamari, Palestinian Women at Work, 1979. Ceramic relief. Courtesy of Barjeel Art Foundation Collection, Sharjah.

Its timing adds another layer of resonance. 2025 has been declared the Year of Craft in Saudi Arabia and has been dedicated to re-examining heritage practices and their place in contemporary life. The exhibition aligns seamlessly with this focus, showing how craft traditions—once dismissed as decorative or confined to the home—were mobilized by women artists to engage with politics, spirituality, and social change. By reclaiming material, experimenting with natural pigments, and dissolving the line between home and museum, these artists expanded the very definition of what Arab modernism could be.

Their message is clear: art is not bound by gendered categories of “craft” versus “fine art.” That the domestic and the political, the traditional and the modern, the home and the museum, are not opposing forces but part of the same continuum. Running until February 2026, Horizon in Their Hands reminds us that the true story of Arab modern art cannot be told without the women who shaped it.

Main image: Mona Al Munajjed, Dreams Come True in Saudi, 2022. Batik on silk. Courtesy of the artist.

The Overlooked Women Behind Arab Modern Art

Suggestions

Articles

Topics

The Overlooked Women Behind Arab Modern Art

Related Stories

More From Art & Culture

Suggestions

Articles

Topics

Newsletter

The only newsletter you won't unsubscribe from

Follow Us