Product details
- ISBN 9780821425800
- Dimensions: 178 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 17 Dec 2024
- Publisher: Ohio University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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This groundbreaking study of Moroccan modernism in the visual arts contextualizes the work in terms of postcolonial struggles and a constellation of contemporary artistic movements.
In the years after independence, new art forms and practices flourished at the Casablanca École des beaux-arts, transforming the colonial relic into a wellspring of Moroccan modernism. Casablanca School artists, including Farid Belkahia, Mohammed Chebaa, and Mohammed Melehi, defined the modernist movement in Morocco. Their visual arts activism was displayed at their iconic outdoor exhibition in the Djemaa al-Fna plaza in Marrakech, in their collaborations with the cultural and political journal Souffles, through their radical anticolonial pedagogy, and through their use of abstraction to expand the horizons of postcolonial national culture.
In Moroccan Modernism, Holiday Powers argues that the pedagogy and transnational solidarities of this generation of artists were intrinsic to their broader artistic projects. She advances a novel reading of Moroccan modernism that is rooted in its cosmopolitan national context and in Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism, the transnational anticolonial intellectual movements that defined the era.
Holiday Powers is an assistant professor of art history at VCUarts Qatar. Her work has appeared in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, the Journal of North African Studies, and in numerous book chapters.
