Mission Statement
The Kamal Boullata Foundation aims to conserve the Jerusalem-born artist’s unique legacy and the independence of this patrimony. By safeguarding the Foundation Archive and making it accessible to artists, researchers and the general public, the Foundation aims to promote education about contemporary art, diverse Arab cultural identities and Christian-Muslim artistic interaction. The cultivation of his legacy stimulates continued dialogues concerned with themes of aesthetics, language, identity and spiritualty that inform his oeuvre.
Archives
Boullata was a key player in the history of modernism in the Arab world, a history that was long neglected, but is now attracting substantial academic and popular attention. His work is notable for engaging historical Christian and especially Islamic art and architecture as a resource capable of energizing and inspiring modern and contemporary aesthetic traditions. Boullata was a major and highly original innovator whose Archive contains materials that show the trajectory of his personal journey from mimetic realism of the 1950s through calligraphic art to a concern with geometry, structure and light. The drawings and studies preserved by the Foundation are traces of process, potential sources of inspiration for current and future generations of visual artists working across media.
Boullata engages both word and image, and literary and visual traditions. His work brought together key figures, creating culture through a collaborative exchange. This was nowhere more beautifully and dramatically expressed than in his friendship with poets such as Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish or Abdellatif Laabi.
This is both an archive in a historical sense and an active, living, resource for all.