Dean of the College Presents
Dina Ramadan
Assistant Professor of Arabic
"The Making and Educating of the Egyptian Artist"
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Olin Humanities, Room 102
7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The establishment of the School of Fine Arts (SFA) in Cairo in 1908 is consistently referenced as marking the birth of an “authentic Egyptian movement.” However, despite this recurring emphasis on the school within historical and critical writing, very little attention has been given to the workings of this institution and its place in larger networks and discourses of the period. In my presentation I will focus on how the school helped produce the (Egyptian) artist as a social and professional category, through an examination of its foundational documents. Unlike other regional examples, the SFA was considered an indigenous initiative, founded and funded by members of the royal family, and staffed by foreign, but not British, instructors. Therefore as an educational and cultural institution it challenges our assumed binaries of colonizer and colonized, native and foreign, and requires us to think seriously about the possibilities of a complex liminal space. Similarly, as a tuition-free establishment, and requiring no previous experience or training, the SFA drew a broad range of students, instigating certain changes between what Bourdieu has referred to as “the world of art. . . and the world of political power” and becoming the nexus for a number of more complicated sociopolitical interactions. I argue that by paying closer attention to these early articulations of the role of artist we understand a great deal about the place of the aesthetic and aesthetic practices in the fashioning of the middle class national subject in early 20th century Egypt.
*Reception prior to the event at 6:30 p.m. in the Olin Atrium
For more information, call 845-758-7421, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102