The Wallach Art Gallery is located on the eighth floor of Schermerhorn Hall on the Morningside Heights campus of Columbia University. Follow this link for a map of the campus.

In the mid twentieth century, artists in the newly independent nation of Iraq experimented with a form of Modernism that they saw as a new and revolutionary artistic idiom for a secular national state. Combining ancient and Islamic forms and genres of art and with Western Modernist influences, these artists set out to create an art for the people. At the same time, they participated in what they saw of Western Modernism by bringing to it older forms of Islamic abstraction. In this way, they challenged both traditional indigenous forms and what they learned from modern art in Europe. Continue for a complete introduction...

Image: Jawad Salim, Baghdadiat (Two Women of Baghdad)