AN OPEN LETTER TO ALL MEMBERS
Dear AMCA members,
As another academic year comes to a close, we wanted to take a moment to update you on AMCA’s annual activities.
Our most exciting recent addition to www.amcainternational.org is our reviews section. We are thrilled to have posted the following reviews thus far: Anneka Lenssen on Tarjama/Translation; Ranya Husami on Fayeq Oweis’ Encyclopedia of Arab American Artists; Walid Sadek on Hassan Khan’s Nine Lessons Learned from Sherif El-Azma; Irmgard Emmelhainz on Ariella Azoulay’s The Civic Contract of Photography; and Mitra Abbaspour on Making Interstices: The Central Asia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. This month, we look forward to Haig Aviazian on Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered. If you are interested in writing a review, submitting a publication for review, or serving on the editorial committee, please contact Sarah Rogers at info@amcainternational.org.
This past November in Boston, AMCA held its annual meeting in conjunction with the Middle East Studies Association’s (MESA) annual conference. Additionally, AMCA sponsored two well-attended and provocative panels: Pirated Politics: Contemporary Art, Artists, and the Postproduction of the Middle East; and Between Public Memory and National Narrative: The Visual Document and History in the Middle East. Please see our website for more information on panel abstracts, chairs, and participants. We were delighted to see some of you in Boston and hope to see you again in San Diego for the 2010 MESA meeting, where we will sponsor a panel on artistic production and leftist politics.
In more news, we are happy to announce that in addition to our affiliation with MESA, we are now affiliates of the College Art Association (CAA). As a result, we will hold a special affiliate session, “Modern Arab Art and its Historical and Methodological Relationships to the Post-Colonial Context” at the 2011 CAA Annual Meeting in New York City. We are also sponsoring two panels: Writing the Middle East; and Interdependent Identities: Paradigm and Paradox in Contemporary Israeli; and Palestinian Art. Please note that as an affiliate of MESA and CAA, AMCA can sponsor up to two panels and we hope that you will consider submitting your panels for AMCA sponsorship for future MESA and CAA conferences.
Our most exciting news thus far is our first international conference, Modern Arab Art: Objects, histories, and Methodologies, to be held at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar. The conference will take place in conjugation with the Museum’s inaugural events and we will keep all our members updated on upcoming details of the conference.
In closing, we would also like to take a moment to thank you for your continued support of AMCA. Please do keep us updated if/when your contact information changes. We welcome any and all comments from members (info@amcainternational.org) and hope that with your support AMCA continues to flourish.
Respectfully yours,
Nada Shabout
AMCA President