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Correspondents' Journal

December 12, 2003

(Click Photos to Enlarge)

As an artist/craftsperson for the past 25 years, I cannot write about the arts in Iraq in a detached manner.  When we first visited the College of Fine Arts and the Hewar Gallery, it was a fine fall day - clear, with a fresh cool breeze - just the kind of day that you remember from school starting, with the excitement of beginnings in the air.  But little in Baghdad is simple or as it seems.  Roads were blocked and barricaded, and armed guards greeted us at the entrance to the school.  Even though students milled around, the chaos and destruction at the school left me dazed, wondering how there could be any thoughts of creation in this place. 

Later, sitting in the gardens at the Hewar Gallery and speaking with various artists, I was reminded that the creative spirit is not so easily discarded or destroyed.  This gallery is an oasis, a place for artists - old and young - to talk and argue, compare, and cross-pollinate.  It took me back to long conversations with fellow artists and craftspeople in other times and places, and the intense joy of ideas beginning to take physical shape. 

I listened to stories of the long years of careers delayed by wars, and creativity frustrated by years of shortages during the sanctions.  I also shared a couple of hours of shoptalk with a fellow potter, discussing clay and glazes and kilns.  I looked at the paintings and sculptures and saw visions revealed as the artists shared their dreams with me.  I remembered why I do art as they told me why they do art.     

A campus where scars overwhelm beauty

Entrance of College of Arts

Sculptures and murals of Babylonian culture flank the entrance to the College of Fine Arts at Baghdad University.  Everywhere you look as you walk this campus, you find the artistic expressions of the human spirit.  Tragically, these are not what first catches the eye or what the heart and mind retains.  Instead, you see the scars of war in this heavily guarded campus:  the bombed-out theater complex, the burned and looted art library, the shattered windows, the classrooms devoid of desks and materials.  

People will long remember images of the Coalition Forces as they stood aside during the looting of the Iraqi National Museum, and the enormous cultural loss that this represented for Iraqis and the entire world. Equally devastating was the damage suffered by universities, initially due to bombings, but more significantly from the looting and burning that followed the war. 

An artist with a long view of history

Hewar Gallery Exhibit

Quasim Al Sabti, a painter, is a former professor at the College of Fine Arts and the founder of the Hewar Art Gallery located behind the school.  He spoke to me with deep sorrow of the "many strangers during the time of the school's looting."  He remembered how they emptied the school and then set fire to the library, destroying more than 5,000 art books and all of the student archives.  And how the Coalition Forces did nothing to stop it.  "The centers of culture and art were destroyed, while the Ministry of Oil was protected.  I think America likes to cancel all the roots of Iraqi art and culture to make a new globalization," Quasim reflected.

Sitting in the garden cafe of the gallery, which was created as a meeting place for fellow artists, Quasim explained: "We are not grass - like American civilization - with short roots.  We are like the date palm trees, ten meters high, but with roots twenty meters deep.  Our culture is 10,000 years old." 

Sanctions and war cannot destroy Iraqi culture

Bombed remains of theatre

In the past twenty years, artists have had their careers interrupted as they were called to fight in three wars.  During the thirteen years of economic sanctions, many art materials could not be imported.  The head of the ceramics department at the university still waits for a kiln ordered from Germany in the early 1990s.  Artists were cut off from rest of the world as sanctions prevented travel. 

Despite hardship, the arts have flourished in Iraq .  Enrollment at the College of Fine Arts went from 400 students before sanctions to the present enrollment of 4,000.  Before 1991, there was one gallery in Baghdad.  Now there are nineteen.  The Hewar Gallery, opened in 1992, mounted 100 exhibits between 1994 and 2003.  Here you are surrounded by art - the vibrant, passionate outpouring of creative energy.

Student looking at burned library

One week after school resumed in the fall, the Turkish Embassy next door to the college was hit by a car bomb, again shattering the glass in the school's windows.  Students walk through rubble to classrooms that are still without desks.  They have returned, despite the conditions.  As teachers bring books from their private collections to establish a new library, Quasim's words sum up the spirit that pervades here:  "It is our pride of heritage and long history that makes us want to do well for the future."

- Mary Trotochaud
Photos by Rick McDowell.

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