Watson Events

Comics have been a complex and subversive form of creative expression for Arab artists, illustrators, and writers since the 1920s. Until today, the visual archive of Arab comics has been absent from mainstream cultural representations of the Middle East. Arab Comics: 90 Years of Popular Visual Culture, a public exhibition hosted by Art at Watson and Middle East Studies, will present a close-up engagement with popular comics that have captured young imaginations from North Africa to the Arabian Gulf.

The Arab Comics exhibition will feature the emergent visual culture of pan-Arabism developed in original Arabic children’s comics during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s; the “Arabization” of Mickey, Tintin and Superman comics for Arab youth during the 1950s, and 1960s; and contemporary comics showcased by the Beirut-based comics collective Samandal. 

The exhibition is co-curated by Mona Damluji and Nadim Damluji.

Art at Watson
Center for Middle East Studies

Co-sponsored by the Cogut Center for the Humanities and the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, and the Mu’taz and Rada Sawwaf Arabic Comics Initiative and Libraries at the American University of Beirut.