But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise: Acquiring Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa

In 2016 I was invited as the third and final curator of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative for the Middle East and North Africa. The project aimed to diversify the Guggenheim Museum’s holdings, with the previous two chapters involving curators and artists from South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America. Prior to the project, the Guggenheim’s American collection was lacking in global art, in particular from these three regions, so the project aimed to build a critical art historical aggregate about the global south that spoke to the museum’s principles of collecting. It resulted in over 125 new acquisitions from those regions underrepresented in the Guggenheim’s collection.

Before I began to acquire works for the museum, I examined the works that already resided in its collection. I aimed to acquire more than one piece by an individual artist to encourage more of their works to enter