Women Defining Women in Contemporary Art of the Middle East and Beyond

Women Defining Women in Contemporary Art of the Middle East and Beyond Women Defining Women in Contemporary Art of the Middle East and Beyond, curated by Linda Komaroff at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), brings together an international roster of forty-two women artists who, as the opening wall text describes them, “were born or live in what can broadly be termed Islamic societies or associated diaspora communities.” The exhibition joins several other exhibitions over the past two decades or so that focus on the contemporary art production of women from the Islamic world, such as Breaking the Veils: Women Artists from the Islamic World (2002), She Who Tells a Story (2013), and Being and Belonging (2023) to name just three. Additionally, to return to the claim made by the exhibition’s opening text mentioned at the start of this review, that the exhibition will change people’s perceptions (and perhaps even more grandiosely in the press materials, that it will inspire a younger generation), I want to turn away from the works themselves and towards the individuals who were in the galleries with me when I saw the exhibition.