Ahmed Morsi: A Dialogic Imagination

Description

Ahmed Morsi: A Dialogic Imagination discusses the places, people, texts, ideas, and materials that have shaped the unique practice of the New York-based Egyptian artist Ahmed Morsi. A painter, poet, printmaker, and critic, Morsi has created a diverse body of work abundant in mythic beauty. After coming of age in the 1940s as part of the Alexandria School, a movement led by free thinkers and artists that marked the city's emergence as a postwar Mediterranean cultural entrepot, Morsi spent time in Baghdad, where he benefited from the city's vibrant literary renaissance of the 1960s, as an art critic and translator, before settling in Cairo, and eventually immigrating to New York in the mid-1970s. In Cairo, Morsi helped lead the journal, Galerie 68, which became the voice of the Egyptian avant-garde, while experimenting with theatrical set design and artist's books. This volume highlights the rich interplay between Morsi's poetry and paintings and emphasizes the way his multivalent practice conducts a dialogue with the wider world.

Hoor Al Qasimi is President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation. She is president of the International Biennial Association; Chair of the Board, Sharjah Architecture Triennial; Chair of the Advisory Board, College of Fine Arts and Design, University of Sharjah; and President of The Africa Institute, Sharjah. She serves on the Board of Directors for MoMA PS1, New York; Kunst-Werke Berlin; and Ashkal Alwan, Beirut. She also serves on the advisory boards for Khoj, New Delhi, and Darat al Funun, Amman. She was also a member of the Prince Claus Award Committee (2016-2020). Salah M Hassan is the Director of The Africa Institute, Sharjah, UAE, and the Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Africana Studies and professor of History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University. He is the founding editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. He is the author and editor of several books and he has curated several international exhibitions. He is the recipient of several grants and fellowships, such as the J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship, as well as major grants from the Sharjah Art, Ford, Rockefeller, Andy Warhol, and Prince Claus Fund foundations.