Dr. Foley wrote a dispatch for Culturunners on the opening of “Symbolic Cities” a solo show at the Smithsonian’s Freer/Sackler gallery by Ahmed Mater, one of Saudi Arabia’s and the Middle East’s leading artists. The show, which features art investigating economic and urban change in Saudi Arabia, is Mater’s first in America and the first by a Saudi artist in the United States. Dr. Foley’s piece examines Mater’s role in the contemporary Saudi arts movement and what Americans can learn from his show about his country. In particular, Dr. Foley concludes: “During this year of the “political outsider” in America, vexing existential questions have come to define our electoral process, forcing us all to choose between seeming incompatible conceptions of national identity and how to view the world…By contrast, and perhaps surprisingly, Mater and Saudis are used to negotiating among widely disparate contexts–contexts which many in the West and some in the Middle East may find contradictory, but which the Saudis experience as part of the multiple faces of reality.”
