Beginning in the late 1940s, a wide constellation of artists from North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia turned to Arabic calligraphic forms and motifs as elements in new artistic practices. Art historians have designated the phenomenon with a variety of terms, from the modern calligraphic school to al-hurufiyya (letter arts), and examined how political change can spark shifting claims to language and alphabetic systems, including negotiating relationships between colonizer and colonized, making claims to religious and communal identities, and reinventing literary and folk traditions. Highlighting the diverse holdings in our UC Berkeley Library collections, this exhibition explores how artists and their contemporaries made use of language as a visual component in work across media. A shared backdrop to the artistic choices on display are decolonization processes and liberation struggles taking place across Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, which sparked desires to create cultural futures in resistance to dominant imperial values and official language policies.

This is an online version of an exhibition first presented in the Bernice Layne Brown Gallery at Doe Library, March 13 - August 31, 2023. For credits, the exhibition checklist, audio guides, and other details, see Exhibition Documentation.