Beauty Made By the Unseen - Art by Saudi Women

A group of ten Saudi women living in the U.S., all of them artists, most of them students, will be featured in an upcoming art exhibit in Minneapolis entitled "Beauty Made By the Unseen."  The exhibit will be held at the Vine Arts Center (2637 27th Ave. South, Minneapolis) from March 8-10, 2013.

The exhibit will include works in oil, acrylic on wood, watercolor, and digital media.

The artists, all originally from Saudi Arabia, come from across the United States - California, Florida, Chicago, Texas, Minnesota, Virginia and Massachusetts. Many of them will be traveling to Minnesota to attend the exhibit. This will be a rare opportunity for Americans to see the artwork of Saudi women and to meet the artists in person.

The publicity for the event states, "Their art shows their journeys of self-discovery as part of their learning process while they are away from home. They try to find artistic voices that truly reflect who they are. These voices not only represent the individual artist, but also portray a picture of the new Saudi woman as she opens up to the world. The art in this exhibit will further illuminate how their transitional path in America changed the way they see themselves and how they deal with western culture. Their art will reveal to us their real concerns and issues."

The exhibit's opening reception on March 8th, International Women's Day, will feature a lecture by Dr. Mody Alkhalaf about women in Saudi Arabia. Dr. Alkhalaf is the assistant attaché for cultural and social affairs at the Saudi Embassy in Washington. She is also an advocate for women's rights.

Dr. Mody Alkhalaf will speak at the opening

Magied Alsqoor, a graduate student from Saudi Arabia who is pursuing a Master's at Minnesota's University of St. Thomas in educational leadership, got the idea for the exhibit last summer. "I have been involved in Saudi students clubs in MN since 2006," he writes. "We had no activities at all to introduce Saudi women to the community here in Minnesota." He worked with artist Hend Al-Mansour and the board of the Arab American Cultural Institute to organize the event.

Location:
Vine Arts Center - 2637 27th Ave. South, Minneapolis

Friday Evening, March 8, 2013
4:00 - 7:00 PM - Public Reception
6:00 - 7:00 PM - Public Lecture by Dr. Mody Alkhalaf about Women in Saudi Arabia

Saturday, March 9, 2013
2:00-6:00 PM - Availability of Artists

Sunday, March 10, 2013
10:00AM - 2:00PM - Availability of Artists

The event is being organized by the Arab American Cultural Institute in Minnesota and is sponsored by the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission in Washington DC.

Margaret Owen's Brilliant Palette

Painter Margaret Owen works with a brilliant color palette. Think Matisse, with a feminine sensibility. She lives in Rhode Island and sometimes paints in Morocco, where she has been involved in Moroccan Sketchbook, a drawing and painting retreat held just outside Marrakesh. Sounds like a dream vacation to me!  The next Sketchbook is scheduled for April, and you can learn more about it here.

For a midwinter pick-me-up, I recommend a visit to her blog, Daily Painting  She also has some of her current paintings on display at a cafe in East Providence, Tea in the Sahara. I'm hoping to get there to see them soon.

If you search for her name on Pinterest, you'll find many of her popular paintings. Here are some to lift your spirits. We always need more color in February!

Qualey's Review of The Girl Who Fell to Earth

Marcia Lynx Qualey is an American resident of Cairo who writes a fantastic blog about Arabic literature in translation. She also reviews works in that genre for the English language press in Cairo. I'm posting a link to the excellent review she wrote of "The Girl Who Fell to Earth" by Sophia Al-Maria, a coming of age story of east and west. Her review appeared in the Egypt Independent. The story is not what you'd expect however, and Marcia tells why.  I am putting this on my to-read list!

You can link to her review  here.

Cab Driver in Fez

So Fez is my absolute favorite city in the Middle East. I have not yet visited Jerusalem, so if I ever have the chance, it will likely move to #1. However, for now at least, Fez is my favorite. Why?

Courtyard of the Qarawiyyin Mosque, founded in 859 AD

• It is the only intact medieval walled city in the Arab world, and I've heard in the whole world.
• Fez has been a center of learning for over a thousand years.
• At its center is a mosque called the Qarawiyyin, founded by a woman named Fatimah in 859 AD. It later expanded into a great university. It attracted students and scholars from afar. That university continues to operate; it's the oldest continually running university in the entire world.
• In the medina (old walled city) itself, no motorized vehicles are allowed. You either walk or ride a horse, donkey or mule.
• Most of Morocco's legendary handcrafts are made in the Fez medina.
• You can speak real full-bodied classical and modern standard Arabic, and they understand you.
• The people are hard-working, and know that what they have, do and are has great worth.
• The city is full of mysteries. 
• The city is beautiful.

During my first visit to Fez in the fall of 2005, my friends and I took a 'petit taxi' cab from our hotel in the new part of Fez to one of the gates of the medina.

A 'petit taxi' outside one of the gates of the Fez medina.

I sat in front since I was the Arabic speaker. We got to chatting, the cabbie and me. He was not white haired, so I'd say he was in his late 40's. Yet he seemed older and wiser. He asked where we were from, I explained we were on a tour of Morocco and studying its culture and folk music and folk dance. When he then said he really liked America, I asked why.

"Simple," he said. "On your coins, it says, 'In God We Trust'." 

That conversation has stayed with me for  a long time. Our founding fathers were men of strong principles and beliefs, but they recognized everyone's right to believe what he or she wanted and there was no talk of imposing beliefs on others. Yet that doesn't mean we have to be godless. There were other times in history when this kind of openness and respect was the order of the day, and some of those times took place in Fez. Scholars from Europe, Africa and all over the Arab World - Muslims, Christians and Jews - studied together there and shared knowledge. It was an example to the world. I think we have to hold fast to that openness and make it our banner for the next millenium. We can't survive with religious groups claiming the sole divine correctness. It's just not going to work. Our founding fathers figured that out, and before them, the good people of Fez - and many other places through history. It's not a new idea; it's a very old one that would help us all.

Writer's Group at the Cafe

My writer's group is a God-send. Not only in terms of regular check-ins, feedback and camaraderie.  For me, the most important thing is the motivation to produce something in time for our next session.

Some of us are writing novels and short stories. Two of us are poets, and most of us also dabble in essays and features. The regulars of the group have all been published. Our goal is to improve our craft, produce more work, and get it published. We are all members of AAUW, (American Association of University Women) which sponsors our group.

 We meet in the evening at Brewed Awakenings, a cafe in Hingham, south of Boston. We are usually the only patrons, and sometimes we have to ask the staff to turn down the pop music on the sound system. They oblige, and over the months have come to know us as 'the writers'.

The first to arrive claims one of our favorite tables near the windows. The seats are comfortable woven wicker. The coffee, hot chocolate, cider and tea are just the thing on a cold winter night. Sometimes one of us will buy a sweet and split it four or five ways.

At first, we sit and read each others' material. Then we give our comments, which range from simple typos and repeated words to big picture points. There is a lot of encouragement.

Last meeting, a group of teenagers, friends of the cafe staff, showed up for a visit just as we got going. A half dozen of them, all at once, decided to sweep the floor under all the tables. It was chaotic and very distracting as they dragged the chairs around and rearranged the tables. But we persevered, for we had nowhere else to go, and we need this time together each month. They would have had to pull us out by the hair to break up our writers group meeting! Eventually things quieted down and we were able to get our work done.