Visiting Scholars Introduce Culture through Art

On the top floor of the Fine Arts Building, in a sparsely furnished studio with newly painted white walls and a view of Martin Stadium, three paintings, in varying states of completion, are fastened to the east wall. Ahmed Ibrahim, a soft-spoken, slender man with dark hair, glasses, and an easy smile, sits on a gray metal stool in front of them.

 

His small laptop computer sits alone in the middle of a long table against the wide wall opposite the windows. Brushes, some rags, and a tray piled high with new-looking tubes of oil paint rest on a small rectangular cart near the center of the room.

The paintings, a still life and two intensely pastel urban landscapes, have a radiant quality and give the illusion of lighting the otherwise empty space behind the artist as he talks.

Ibrahim is at WSU as a visiting scholar on a joint supervision mission from Helwan University in Cairo, Egypt, where he is working toward his doctoral degree in fine arts. Having arrived in March after nine months of planning and miles of paperwork, he will spend one, possibly two years in Pullman completing his dissertation before he returns to Egypt, where he will rejoin the Helwan Faculty of Fine Arts.

WSU professor of art Chris Watts helped arrange the visit and is Ibrahim's director of studies in the U.S.

Through a complicated series of intersecting events, Watts' academic connections to Egypt, where he has been a visiting artist, extend back several decades. But after 9/11, Watts said, those connections went cold.

"Part of this is my interest in keeping ties going with the Middle East," said Watts. "I am committed to working on fostering exchanges with Egyptian artists and scholars and hope that in the future some of our faculty and students can visit Cairo, Alexandria, and Luxor."

For Ibrahim, the transition from a desert metropolis of 17.8 million people to rural eastern Washington has been significant. "It's too quiet," said Ibrahim, who has also been struggling to find supplies to make his stained glass work here.

The Department of Fine Arts has a strong history of cultural exchange including programs in Russia, Japan, China, and now Egypt, and Watts, himself a native of England who joined the WSU faculty as department chair in 1988, has been instrumental in facilitating their success.

"I've had a longtime interest in getting people from other cultures to WSU," said Watts. "You find ways of talking about art, and through that you get to culture."

"We find that having visiting scholars and artists enriches our program," said Carol Ivory, department chair. "It is a wonderful way to have meaningful exchanges and for each participant to learn about the other's culture and educational systems . . . Ahmed and the other visiting scholars and artists have brought energy and enthusiasm with them, which they share with and infuse the department."

Each year the Department of Fine Arts' Forst Visiting Artist Endowment makes several short-term visits by artists possible. The department also hosts scholars and artists who receive support from their home governments for longer residencies. In 2004 Korean artist and scholar Jun Keun Kim from Chungbuk National University in Seoul, South Korea, spent the year at WSU. This August professor Cao Zhengwei from Chongqing University in China will arrive to spend the year at WSU.