The Dialectics of the Decorative in Iraqi Art will be devoted to mapping out, analyzing and contextualizing the modern artists and critics in Iraq who were instrumental in constructing the language of art between 1951 and 1973. This book will argue that this period introduced an understanding of the decorative in Iraqi art as a way of resolving the crisis of representation that is modernism.
Nada Shabout is a Professor of Art History and the Director of the Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies Initiative at the University of North Texas. She is the author of Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics (University of Florida Press, 2007); co-editor of New Vision: Arab Art in the 21st Century (Thames & Hudson, 2009); and co-editor of the forthcoming Modern Art of the Arab World: Primary Documents (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018). She is the founding president of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art from the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey. She co-curated Modernism and Iraq at the Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, 2009, and curated the traveling exhibition, Dafatir: Contemporary Iraqi Book Art, 2005-2009.