October 15 – December 15, 2012
The countries and societies stretching from Morocco to India—parts of which are known variously as the Middle East, North Africa, and/or the Fertile Crescent–both share histories and traditions—political, social, religious and cultural—and have developed indigenous and local cultures that distinguish them from their neighbors. None of these societies is immune or impervious to the pressures of modern transformations—the Arab Spring being the most recent modernizing wave engulfing parts of this world. One of the factors of change is mobility: the ability to travel, to visit, or to settle in another place and to find or create community, constituting, thereby, a diaspora that is more often than not the site of acculturation and adaptation to a new society. One of the loci of transformation, as well as the agent of change, is woman to whom this exhibit looks as a consumer, transformer and producer of culture. This exhibition brings together women from the East—as defined above—most of whom live or work abroad, whose contact with other cultures transforms the artistic traditions that travel with them.