Gazbia Sirry and Egyptian Modernists in Nasser’s Revolutionary Egypt

This lecture comes out of a broader study of the mid-twentieth-century emergence of postcolonial strongmen in Africa, and artists’ response to this phenomenon. The focus of this lecture will be the work of the Egyptian artist Gazbia Sirry (1925–2021), to illustrate how the country’s leading modernists, in the wake of the 1952 Free Officers Revolution, were swayed by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s charisma, putting their art in the service of his brand of Egyptian nationalism and Pan-Arabist ideology. But how did Sirry respond to Nasser’s increasingly repressive regime and the devastating outcome of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War? We follow the formal and tonal shifts in Sirry’s work as it engaged with, and was shaped by, Nasser’s and post-revolutionary Egypt’s political fortunes.

Chika Okeke-Agulu, an artist, critic and art historian, is Robert Schirmer Professor of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies, and Director of Africa World Initiative at Princeton University. He is editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. His most recent books include El Anatsui: The Reinvention of Sculpture (2022); African Artists: From 1882 to Now (2021); Yusuf Grillo: Painting. Lagos. Life (2020). Okeke-Agulu was the Slade Professor of Fine Art, University of Oxford (2023), and is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Cosponsored by History of Art