Opening the Door to Sharq

Nahid Massoud’s warm embrace greets guests walking up her Palisades driveway on an early October afternoon. Dressed elegantly in a black two-piece pants suit of traditional Afghan burka design and embroidery, Massoud points people down the stone path to her newly completed backyard gallery. ”This is the first art opening reception at Sharq, an art space created for the work of bicultural artists with roots in the East (Sharq means ‘the East’ in Farsi). About 200 people turn out to see the paintings of Kurdish artist Tahir Fatah. ”’There is no place devoted to Sharqi artists in Los Angeles,’ says Massoud, a Muslim woman born in Kabul, Afghanistan. The pants suit she is wearing for only the second time was a gift given to her in 1977, when she left her native country to come to the United States on a student visa. While she was in the States, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and she has never returned to her homeland. ”Having seen occasional exhibits of contemporary artists from Sharq at places such as Bergamot Station’s Schomburg Gallery, Massoud wanted to create a space dedicated to bicultural Sharqi artists ‘with the aim of showing the diversity and creativity in that little-known and often misunderstood region.’ ”The idea for Sharq was born soon after the September 11 terrorist attacks, when Massoud realized the crucial need for intercultural exchange and felt encouraged to share the memories of her experiences in her native country with the public. Having grown up in a privileged diplomatic household, Massoud has childhood memories that include living and studying in Saudi Arabia, India, Egypt, Turkey and Iran. ”’I wanted to share the beauty of other parts of the Sharqi world,’ she says. ‘The more exchanges you have, the more understanding [you have].’ ”Massoud, who became a United States citizen on May 13, 1991, adds that the Sharq project is also personally satisfying for her as Afghan-American woman because ‘it’s satisfying my personal sense of belonging.’ ”Prior to the development of Sharq, Massoud co-taught a class on the history and culture of Afghanistan with her husband, Robert Rosenstone, a history professor at Caltech, and has lectured at Palisades venues such as St. Matthew’s and Villa Aurora. She is currently on staff at the Neuropyschiatric Institute at UCLA, where she is a nurse specializing in eating disorders. ”One may wonder how Massoud has made time to cultivate such an important undertaking, and the answer lies in her passion for sharing her culture and learning about other cultures. ”When she initially told artists and people working in the art world about her idea for Sharq, they were ‘excited about a bicultural niche,’ she says. ‘Whether it will be accepted by [other] people, I don’t know.’ ”Yet judging from the first reception, which drew a multicultural crowd with Egyptian, Algerian, Moroccan, Palestinian, Iranian, Lebanese and American backgrounds, she and Rosenstone are hopeful. ”The 900-square-foot art space has bamboo flooring, which Massoud chose because she wanted ‘something soothing’ that could also be used for dance or yoga. She also thought the bamboo would complement the ‘natural, even light’ of the gallery, which has high ceilings and five skylights. ”Soon after beginning renovations on the guest house space a year ago, Massoud met artist Tahir, who was born in Sulymanih, Kurdistan (the part of Kurdistan which is currently Northern Iraq). She had heard about him from a friend, and felt an immediate connection to Tahir in terms of ‘the Sharq part of us,’ she says. ‘We share this world, its symbols and metaphors, as well as in our upbringing with the Koran and the history of our civilizations.’ ”Massoud had ‘an intuitive feeling’ that he was the right artist to exhibit at Sharq but says, ‘I didn’t know if Tahir, as an accomplished artist, would allow his art to be here, in a small space behind our house in the Palisades.’ ”Fortunately, Tahir, who attended the Baghdad Institute of Art before winning a four-year scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1966, also felt a sentimental connection to Massoud based on their cultural similarities. ”’We hold a certain romantic notion of where we come from, but it does not represent who we are there,’ Tahir says, explaining that ‘we would still be there [in Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively] if we had the openness to evolve there.’ ”He believed that showing his paintings at Sharq in October was important in terms of ‘uniting ourselves as bicultural people in a universal setting, and establishing a connection to American culture.’ Like Massoud, Tahir appreciates America because it’s connected to freedom of choice. ‘America has the natural ingredients and richness of potential to be engaged,’ he says. ‘It’s a fertile land in terms of human potentiality. I came here without a language and I was able to achieve a scholarship.’ ”Tahir was only 21 years old in 1964 when he came to the United States with $400 in his pocket. He worked as a dishwasher in Washington, D.C., before going first to California and then to Chicago to study art. Since earning his MFA, he has had exhibitions in Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. ”From a gallery point of view, Tahir says that there are not many places to show his art because it doesn’t fit into a category in terms of art history, such as Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism or Cubism. Galleries find his art ‘harder to accept because they can’t place me,’ he says, though he finds strange joy in this since ‘I don’t feel like I can place myself.’ ”At the same time, Tahir does feel a sense of collectiveness because ‘I have studied classical painting and live in the modern world.’ During the day, he works as a scenic artist for NBC’s TV series ‘Passions,’ and often produces copy paintings of classical works to hang on sets. ”’Scenic painting has been liberating,’ he says, explaining that it’s made him comfortable working on a large scale. ”Tahir sees his work as related to the struggle of the Kurdish people in their search for liberty and freedom, but he says that ‘it is not frozen in the boundaries of nationalism.’ The lights and darks of his large acrylic paintings represent the Kurdish struggle, or what he considers his ‘romantic belief and trust that you can end free. [Hope] is around the corner, but never there.’ ”The dark colors, particularly the blacks, are in one sense a reflection of his childhood in Kurdistan because, as Tahir explains, in the Islamic world adults would often ‘scare and discipline kids through underground spirits of the night.’ For example, as a boy he was told ‘If you go out at night, you will step on the ghost spirits of children.’ ”But Tahir is no longer afraid of the spirits. ‘I’ve learned to live with this through painting.’ ”On the other hand, the holes of black space in his painting also reflect a possible collapse of gravity, an idea he relates to an American image he has of when Apollo went to the moon and there was the image of Earth rising from the moon, full of light and surrounded by black. ”Tahir often uses nature as a metaphor for his own feelings and thought processes, painting just a glance of sky to reveal tension and vulnerability, or an image of water to represent ‘where you can go’ off land. ”’The absence of things has more psychological impact,’ he says, adding that the psychological aspects of his paintings link all of his work. ”’Kurdistan, to me, is very present here,’ Massoud says, standing in the middle of the sky-lit, bamboo-floored gallery and pointing out the dominant red-oxide soil color and fragmented bits of blue sky in Tahir’s dramatic natural landscapes. One guest who came to see the art called the parts where the sky peeks out ‘windows of hope.’ ”’People have been very affected by his art,’ she says. ”In the future, Massoud and Rosenstone say they would like to have events that involve the visual arts, crafts, music and the spoken word. They have not yet set a date for the next event, though they are planning to have a particular Iranian artist show his work sometime early next year. ”’You have to work from what you know, and Nahid knows Sharq,’ Rosenstone says.