Nicolas Moufarrege: Recognize My Sign

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Poem: Nicolas Moufarrege

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Contents

ETEL P

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ADNAN

NICOLAS

AN

AMBITIOUS

STITCH P

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INTERVIEWS

MOUFARREGE

DEAN

BY

DADERKO

C O S M O P O LI S: OF

NICOLAS

RECOGNIZE

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KAELEN

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PLATES

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MY SIGN

CAMH

ON

THE

CITIES

MOUFARREGE

WILSON-GOLDIE

CHECKLIST AND

F U T U R E,

STITCH

OF

THE

EXHIBITION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

STAFF

AND

CONTRIBUTORS

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Etel Adnan and Nicolas Mufarrij’s exchange, Les masques éclatés de Nicolas Mufarrij [The Bursting Masks of Nicolas Mufarrij] originally appeared in Le Beyrouthin, no. 8, November 1973.1 Translation by Dean Daderko

MOUFARREGE

I went to see Nicolas Mufarrij at Condas gallery.This sensitive and discreet being has a most interesting background. He first studied chemistry and got his master’s degree at Harvard. A scientific training in an artist is always a very happy thing.

Science can give painting, if there is talent, a rigor that it transposes in its compositions, as well as a store of images that can never be respected enough.

There is also a respect for the secrets of life that the studies of chemistry or biology develop, respect which is translated, in the artist, into an understanding of the forms which for others would be purely abstract or arbitrary, or a sense of mysterious laws that support seemingly free combinations of forms.

RECOGNIZE

So I had a long interview with Muffarij during which he told me he had tried several trades before deciding to make tapestry. He was a disc jockey, laboratory assistant, decorator ...

ETEL ADNAN: Why do you make tapestry?

NICOLAS MOUFARREGE: Because I like to create things with my hands.

E A : Yes, but why not, for example, ceramics in this case?

N M : It’s a long story. When I was in America, patchwork was fashionable. I had a hole in my jeans one day and I did not want to put on a regular patch. So I stitched a strawberry to patch the hole. I took a liking to it, especially since I discovered that I liked to draw. I took another pair of my blue jeans and I stitched a pattern of flowers and butterflies, taken from a Salvador Dali lithograph, onto the right leg with embroidery floss.

Having seen that I could reproduce a drawing in embroidery, I thought that I could just as well reproduce something of mine. I started to make small embroidered pieces that I have either sold or given to my friends.

MY SIGN

In the exhibition I am preparing for Condas, I will show portraits.

These are faces made with woven cotton or woolen threads.

I am trying to free myself from drawing on paper. I start to

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improvise, to work the material directly without having to follow a drawing made beforehand, as do some primitives, or children.2 This, elsewhere, is called experimental weaving.

E A : On the research side of materials, do you intend to use other fibers such as rope, jute, nylon or metal wire?

N M : No, not for the moment. I’m doing blends of silk, cotton, and wool in the same work. This gives me different thicknesses, vibrant textures, full of movement and tone ... It is in this way that I am currently working.

RECOGNIZE

Nicolas Moufarrij showed me his drawings and paintings where the influence of rock and acid-trip culture can be strongly sensed.

He works under the influence of Miles Davis, Weather Report, Pink Floyd, and David Bowie. This is how traditional craftsmanship becomes a personal art full of promise.

MY SIGN

To see the models, photos, projects ... villas seen from outside or interior sets, I repeated to myself the remark of Nicolas Mufarrij: “It’s about traveling in the same room” ... In short, inside or out, art is always an invitation to travel ...

1 Mufarrij is a variant spelling of Moufarrege that was used by the artist when he began exhibiting.

2 The term “primitive” was in widespread use during this period as a catchall term to describe the work of outlier artists.

NICOLAS A. MOUFARREGE RECOGNIZE MY SIGN

Title unknown, 1984-85 Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 39 1/2 × 32 inches

Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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AMBITIOUS FUTURE, STITCH BY STITCH

Dean

Daderko

I want to draw. I want to paint. I have something to say.

To everyone and to as many as I possibly can.

I am doing it on the streets.

I am doing it in my room, I am doing it underground.

I am doing it on the trains, on the billboards, in the mail.

The palaces are full but new ones are being built: in the nightclubs and in the bathrooms.

I will work with and on whatever I can lay my hands on.

I will carve on a tree or a rock, I will use paint, chalk, or any stick that leaves a mark. I will draw pictures and color them.

I will write words, in my language and in yours. I will build toys.

I will make sounds and instruments that make sounds.

I will rap and I will sing and I will dance to it all.

I want you to know my name.

I want you to recognize my sign.1

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Embroidered jeans, n.d.

Thread on denim 41 × 37 inches

Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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Nicolas Abdallah Moufarrege (1947–1985), who was born in Alexandria, Egypt, to Lebanese parents, was raised and educated in Beirut by a Christian family during the country’s golden age.2 An avid and intelligent student, he received undergraduate and graduate degrees in chemistry at the American University of Beirut. His determination and promise in the field were recognized with a Fulbright Scholar grant and teaching assistantship to Harvard University’s chemistry department, where his life took a major turn in 1968. Sea changes can often be traced back to events and experiences of great consequence; in Moufarrege’s case, his life was changed by a hole in his jeans.

According to the artist, when he went shopping to find a patch to fix the hole, none of the patches appealed to him, so he decided to make his own. He created a small patch in the shape of a strawberry and used it to repair the damaged denim. Having thoroughly enjoyed the embroidering process, he decided to decorate the leg of a pair of his bell-bottom jeans. Basing the design on a favorite Salvador Dalí lithograph, Moufarrege used cotton embroidery floss to fashion a colorful image of a flower whose leaves were replaced by sprouting butterfly wings. It was through this experience that Moufarrege discovered his love of drawing, which formed the foundation for his embroidered designs, and his appreciation for how the slow accumulation of stitches coalesced in an image. Looking back, in a 1973 interview with the artist and writer Etel Adnan, Moufarrege stated that when he realized he could reproduce another artist’s work in embroidery, he thought he might just as well create an original image. While still in Cambridge, he began crafting small patches and embroideries that he sold or gave to friends. With these creations under his belt, Moufarrege made the transformative decision to leave chemistry behind and become an artist.

Returning to Beirut from the United States, Moufarrege took a position at Triad Condas gallery, where he worked at the front desk. He continued to embroider, and it was not long before the gallery offered him his first solo exhibition in 1973. Moufarrege worked diligently, creating a body of modestly sized tapestry portraits from cotton and wool threads. Rather than planning his images in advance and filling in the outlines on the embroidery canvas in the style of needlepoint kits, Moufarrege adopted an organic and improvisational approach, building the image organically as he stitched.

His portraits revealed a remarkable sensitivity to the movement, color, and tones that were possible when various thicknesses and types of thread were mixed together. His aesthetic sensibility blended Middle Eastern textile traditions and Surrealist imagery with a nod to psychedelia. One of these portraits is a round red face that resembles a pomegranate; underneath wide eyes with spokes like wagon wheels are two pairs of stylized, side-by-side red and blue lips. This feminine face is crowned with a set of horns. If this same canvas is flipped vertically, the horns pass for a handlebar moustache and the portrait assumes an insectlike and decidedly more masculine quality.

After visiting his exhibition, Adnan quickly recognized Moufarrege’s innate talents.

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A.

Moufarrege’s artistic career is punctuated by a series of transnational relocations, from Beirut to Paris to New York City, that are each accompanied by notable developments in his practice. In 1975, with the Lebanese Civil War approaching, Moufarrege went to France. While the tapestry works he made in Beirut were densely stitched and lap-sized, this move seems to have fueled his artistic ambitions: he began working larger and turned from making tapestries to paintings. One canvas he stitched during this period shows a stylized facial profile with closed eyes floating like a raft toward thickets of high-rise buildings. The waters propelling the face-raft appear calm, and the sky behind this futuristic landscape is full of planetary orbs. Is this a self-portrait that evokes the dream of awakening in a new and unfamiliar land?

MOUFARREGE

NICOLAS

In an article in the culture section of Le Beyrouthin magazine she stated, “this is how traditional craftsmanship becomes a personal art full of promise.”3

RECOGNIZE

The scale of Moufarrege’s work increased again when he began wrapping embroidery canvas over wooden stretcher bars made for paintings. He also freed himself from the inclination to cover every inch of his pieces with dense stitches, instead choosing to play sections of embroidery against passages or outlines in paint. “The object Moufarrege proposes is fundamentally hybrid: not totally tapestry, embroidery, or painting, and all of that at once,” wrote the critic Pierre Restany.4 Moufarrege’s own assessment is more poetic: “The needle moves into and through the holes; it weaves the fabric of a veil. Painting covers its body.”5 Le sang du phénix [The Blood of the Phoenix] (1975) encapsulates the artist’s newfound energies. At 50 by 64 inches, this embroidered painting is a tremendous physical endeavor that is matched by its conceptual aspirations. Anchored by images of five columns set on stepped bases, pairs of eyes peer out from the top of the image, floating through the scene like fog or clouds. In the painting’s lower left corner, a fist rises from a landscape, hemmed in by mountains behind it and the sea in front. In the upper right corner the clouds part to reveal a tattered image of the red and white striped Lebanese flag adorned with a green cedar tree. Though its composition skews towards the surreal and mystical, the painting’s symbolism is an unmistakable response to real world events: The clenched fist and flag evoke political strife in his conflicted homeland.

MY SIGN

This period also marks Moufarrege’s first mature forays into appropriation, where his idiosyncratic designs are woven together with references to historic artworks. Clearly, Moufarrege’s eye had been drawn to Baroque and Neoclassical art; the canvases from his years in Paris feature figures inspired by and adapted from figurative paintings and prints by Peter Paul Rubens, Marcantonio Raimondi, and Francesco Migliori, and landscapes by Claude Lorrain. One imagines him encountering these artworks in Parisian museums, rare book shops, and galleries. He sought reproductions of these

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Title unknown, n.d.

Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 51 1/4 × 38 1/4 inches

Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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artists’ works in publications and made photocopies of them. Sketching on top of the black-and-white copies in pen and pencil, he generated simplified outlines, which he enlarged and transferred to embroidery canvas. In these paintings, the dynamic movement of human musculature feels intensified when it’s set against the delicacy of embroidery thread.

Significantly, the figures that appear in the paintings from this period present as male.

They are seen from behind as they gaze into fantastic landscapes. Panoramas with smoking volcanoes, vast oceans, and sunset skies blend into geometric patterns adapted from Islamic tile work and Japanese textiles; patterns and places melt into one another.

The artist Mounira Al Solh has astutely recognized that these figures are looking out onto scenes that physically and psychologically dwarf them, and that while they seem to be struggling to enter these looming landscapes, we find them painfully caught at a threshold.6 It is compelling to relate these scenographies to the sense of longing Moufarrege must have felt leaving his family and local surroundings behind as the specter of war loomed in Lebanon. Do these works embody his worries about the people and places he left behind, or reservations about where he was going? Though he was fluent in French, he would have been considered an outsider in the city, even with the invitations to exhibit his work in Paris, Amsterdam, and London that established him as a modern cosmopolitan.

RECOGNIZE

Many of Moufarrege’s figurative paintings possess an erotic charge. A compelling argument could be made that these nameless, faceless, athletic masculine figures that appear on the verge of entry into new worlds offer an analogue for Moufarrege’s emerging gay sexuality.

While this remains a conjecture, one thing is certain: In the works he created in Paris, Moufarrege looked closely at and took pleasure in representing nude masculine bodies in fantastic landscapes.

MY SIGN

Title unknown, n.d.

Thread on needlepoint canvas 19 × 16 1/2 inches

Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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Other sociopolitical positions begin to emerge in tandem: It seems important to recognize that Moufarrege’s use of embroidery “shifts the hegemony of the gender binary and heterosexism,” as the writer and art historian Élisabeth Lebovici observes.7 The activity is, she continues, “heavily identified with Western, patriarchal, heterosexist norms of femininity.”8 Looking back, we can relate Moufarrege’s material processes to the investigations of many of his feminist peers who reinvigorated craft-based processes with vital content. This political and social stance may not have been so clear in the moment though. Moufarrege’s good friend and fellow artist Elaine Reichek states: “I would like to say that my early work in thread had a feminist impetus, but when I began sewing in 1972, feminist art discourse was in a nascent stage, and I worked on my own with little knowledge of what other women were doing.”9, 10 In France the situation was similar, as feminists waged battles for equal rights in their own patriarchal and heterosexist society. Seen from this vantage point, Moufarrege’s decision to focus on embroidery is imbued with a potent radicality. He made an unexpected choice and reveled in it.

Though his work developed substantially in Paris, Moufarrege’s time there was fraught. According to Restany, “he sold very little, and money was scarce. The situation became unbearable when the immigration office stirred up troubles.”11 Moufarrege decided to make his way to New York City.

My work incorporates elements from the near and distant past, the present, and an ambitious future. It mixes classical culture with pop, images and writing, sound with mood—creating various levels of interpretation and reading. One of its basic premises is the affirmation of joy—the Truth of a planet inhabited by a romantic, sometimes intelligent species.12

If the works Moufarrege created in Beirut are the beginning of a lifelong commitment to textile work, and the works he created in Paris demonstrate its flowering to address a host of personal and societal issues, the works he created during his time in New York—where he would write the lines above—see the artist coming to his full powers: He combined his varied interests, skills, and experiences to produce paintings with sharply intelligent, humorous cultural commentary. The ways he engaged the public expanded to include writing and curatorial efforts. Moufarrege was a lauded and regularly published critic, and the exhibitions he curated were festive, much anticipated shows everyone wanted to be in. He seemed to be everywhere, all at once. The poet Rene Ricard recognized Moufarrege’s seemingly boundless energy and enthusiasms when he said, “the most important things in life are to help other people and to make yourself famous. Nicolas accomplished each by doing the other.”13

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Moufarrege hit the ground running in New York. He arrived in 1981 and settled into an apartment on St. Mark’s Place in the Lower East Side. By 1982 he had secured a studio in Long Island City, Queens, through P.S.1, the Institute for Art and Urban Resources’ International Studio Program. During his two years there, he presented the shows The New York Times Front Page (1982) and A Flag for the ’80s (1983). Once again, he synthesized new and unfamiliar material, reconfiguring it in compelling ways. One imagines the precision it takes to incorporate materials encountered on the fly and to rearrange and reconstitute them to produce coherent visual statements. This is just what Moufarrege did. For his 1982 show in his studio, Moufarrege plastered the walls with thousands of newspaper headlines and magazine clippings and then hung his paintings directly on top of this riotous collage of words and images. With this installation strategy, Moufarrege put his artwork in a literal and figurative dialogue with events taking place in the world at large.

RECOGNIZE

Building on his previous experiments with the appropriation of Baroque and Neoclassical source material, in New York his engagement with the process became sharper and more crystalline, and also funnier. He admired pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein who appropriated artistic imagery from quotidian cultural sources—magazine advertisements, reference manuals, and comic books. In an act of double appropriation, Moufarrege incorporated the pop artist’s already-copied images into his own works.

Lichtenstein’s painting Drowning Girl (1963) pulled its subject from a romance comic book published by DC Comics’s Arleigh Publishing Corporation. Lichtenstein offers us a view of a heroine with teary closed eyes, struggling against choppy waves, her head just above water. A thought bubble tells us what she’s thinking: “I don’t care! I’d rather sink -- than call Brad for help!” Moufarrege goes a step further, appropriating this appropriation, finding a new edge. He controls content and emotion by juxtaposing unlikely images against one another; in this painting, the drowning woman occupies the bottom right of his composition, while in the top left corner he introduces a stylized image of a wave adapted from Katsushika Hokusai’s famous woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa (c. 1829). Dripping with claw-like froth, the wave seems to be reaching across the canvas to deliver the coup de grace that will send the heroine to her watery grave.

MY SIGN

A closer look at the physicality of Moufarrege’s paintings is illuminating. The embroidery canvas he stapled over wooden stretcher bars has an open weave, making it semi-transparent. In the painting referenced above, blocked out sections surrounding the wave and heroine have been painted red and gold. The red pigmentation in the upper right hand corner merely stains the natural-colored embroidery canvas, while on the bottom left side, it appears that multiple coatings have been applied, closing the holes in the net-like surface, and intensifying the color. The edges of the

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Title unknown, 1984 Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 39 1/2 × 32 inches

Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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NICOLAS A. MOUFARREGE RECOGNIZE MY SIGN

Title unknown, 1984 (detail) Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 39 1/2 × 32 inches

Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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rectangular image Lichtenstein created are relaxed in Moufarrege’s reproduction of it; the top right corner of his wavers against the red pigment, with pencil lines behind it that recall the original cropping of Lichtenstein’s composition. Moufarrege’s copy of Hokusai’s wave removes both the fishermen’s boats that braved the rough seas, and the background appearance of a distant Mount Fuji in the wave’s valley. The metallic gold pigment that surrounds the wave fills the holes of the canvas’s weave, offering glittering light and dark contrasts. Details of a smaller wave in front of the larger one have been flattened and generalized with a uniform silvery embroidery. To create the foamy curl of the wave, the artist stitched both white and icy blue embroidery threads side by side, effectively mixing them as a painter might combine two colors—wet into wet—on the surface of a canvas. In a particularly sensitive move, the lines that form the heroine’s hand are stitched vertically, in opposition to the predominantly horizontal stitches that form the rest of the painting, which reinforces a sinking sensation.

Metallic embroidery floss in shades of navy, pink, powder blue, and mauve make the painting’s surface scintillate as though it’s wet, a shocking and suitable juxtaposition when compared to the flatness of the originally appropriated comic source.

Like Moufarrege, many artists working in New York in the early 1980s were utilizing appropriative strategies in ways that questioned notions of authenticity, originality, and authorship. Jeff Koons encased vacuum cleaners in dustless plexiglass vitrines lit with fluorescent tubes, and Sherrie Levine re-photographed famous black-andwhite pictures from publications on Walker Evans and Edward Weston. Relative to these more austere examples, Moufarrege’s appropriations represent an additive and exultant approach. His works draw together a variety of sources, mixing up an informative and often symbolic cultural stew. The painting The Truth About John the Baptist (1983) is an extended horizontal composition bookended by the comic book characters The Thing and the Silver Surfer. Occupying the center of the work, a line of Arabic script floating before a golden sky translates as “my father taught me Arabic calligraphy.” Underneath this line, the biblical infant Moses floats on a raft of bulrushes.

Moufarrege accents the painting’s surface with glitter, pinning gold brooches to its face. He tantalizes us with coded messages. The numerical grouping 3712 appears again and again in his paintings, as do the character Spiderman and a calligraphic representation of the Arabic word ‫معن‬. The latter, made of the Arabic letters noon, ayn, and meem, and pronounced “nam,” translates as the word “yes.” Pointedly, this reimagines the artist’s proclivity to stitch his initials—NAM—onto the bottom right corner of his earliest tapestries. Spiderman appears as a self-portrait stand-in for the artist in numerous works, often swinging in on the tail of the word ‫معن‬. Like other mythical references that would have interested Moufarrege—Arachne, the three Fates, the Valkyries— Spiderman is a spinner of narrative webs. Santa Claus, also known as Saint Nicholas, makes similar appearances in the New York paintings. In The Weather Last

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Tuesday (1983), the names recorded on Santa’s list include Belfast, Guernica, Vietnam, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima—places which, like the artist’s beloved Beirut, were ravaged by war and conflict. These examples demonstrate that in Moufarrege’s cosmology, even a seemingly kitsch reference may hold a deeper historical or political meaning.

MOUFARREGE

The New York paintings also celebrate queer content in various ways. Moufarrege’s use of embroidery is an unlikely painting strategy that effects a queering of process.

His depictions of comic book heroes are the quintessential symbols of idealized masculinity. He used comic relief to introduce other queer scenarios, including a painting of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck fishing together on a pier while an excited Donald exclaims “Look Mickey I’ve hooked a big one!!” Moufarrege duplicates this image—the original is, once again, a painting by Lichtenstein—adding a muscular torso below the comic characters. This “big one” Donald has hooked now implies a potential sexual conquest and makes a sly nod to gay cruising at New York’s West Side piers. Moufarrege celebrated other queer artists, including Andy Warhol and the photographer Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, by quoting their artworks in his own creations. In fact, the same classical torso that appears in the “Look Mickey” painting makes another appearance in a modestly sized work where it sprouts the Empire State Building in place of a head; this is, very probably, a paean to Warhol’s film Empire (1964). Most of all, if Moufarrege’s works are any evidence, it seems that in New York he became an artist with few reservations about being queer; instead, he celebrated it. In an untitled work from 1984–85, Moufarrege replicates Roy Lichtenstein’s painting Self-Portrait (1978). Lichtenstein’s artwork positions a reflective mirror above an empty T-shirt; viewers standing before the painting are invited to imagine their own reflection in its surface. Moufarrege juxtaposes his copy of this Lichtenstein painting with a linear depiction of a nude figure, seen from the back, which takes up half of the overall composition. Stylistically, this figure resembles those that appear in the Paris paintings. This new iteration dispenses with the sense of melancholy that haunts his earlier works, though. We find Moufarrege delivering a more confident and grounded riposte: This is who I am. Who are you?

RECOGNIZE MY SIGN

In addition to Lichtenstein and Warhol, Moufarrege’s New York paintings borrowed images created by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Yves Klein, Piet Mondrian, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Guido Reni, and Vincent van Gogh. This is a breathtaking range of artists, both historically and aesthetically; through his quotation of their work, Moufarrege inserted his voice into grander, more complex artistic dialogues that show his serious wit and critical acumen. His sense of humor was evident: One of Moufarrege’s works from the mid-1980s juxtaposes reproductions of paintings by Lichtenstein and Klein. Lichtenstein’s I Can See the Whole Room!...and There’s Nobody in it! (1961) shows a square-jawed man peering through a peep hole; in Moufarrege’s work

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the character from Lichtenstein’s piece is set back in the upper right hand corner. His voice seems to echo through the empty space as he fixes his sights on a view of Klein’s People Begin to Fly (1961). Klein created the work by spray painting around the bodies of eight women lying on top of the canvas, capturing their active silhouettes as they mime postures of flight. With his love of graffiti, it’s clear why Moufarrege would have been drawn to Klein’s spray painted work. In this dance of presence and absence, Moufarrege’s adaption suggests these aeronauts have already abandoned the room and taken to the skies.

In 1985, Moufarrege approached Elaine Reichek to discuss a rash he’d recently developed. Reichek recommended that he see her family dermatologist, Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien. As it happens, Friedman-Kien was one of the first doctors to diagnose Kaposi’s sarcoma, a cancer that often signals the progression of an HIV infection to AIDS. Moufarrege learned he was positive early in the epidemic’s outset. With little information available about the disease, fear reigned, and it was difficult to locate hospitals that would care for the afflicted. After a painstaking search, Moufarrege was admitted to the North Central Bronx Hospital, where his condition rapidly deteriorated.

Nicolas Abdullah Moufarrege died on Tuesday, June 4, 1985, at the age of 37.

Moufarrege’s final solo exhibition in New York, which was on view when he passed away, was at FUN Gallery. The show realized one of his New York goals: It contextualized his paintings alongside the work of other artists he greatly admired, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Fab 5 Freddy, Keith Haring, and Lady Pink, who also exhibited there. His last show featured a number of diptychs. Each one pairs a pre-printed embroidery kit reproduction of an artwork with a second canvas of an embroidered image Moufarrege made. One diptych offers a Fragonard painting entitled Jeune Fille Lisant [Young Girl Reading] (c. 1770); Moufarrege surrounded this pre-printed image in a fabric patterned with Egyptian hieroglyphics. This diptych’s companion canvas is Moufarrege’s recreation of Picasso’s painting Woman Holding a Book (Marie-Therese Walter) (1932). Stylistically, these two readers could not be more dissimilar, and yet they both radiate calm energy and bourgeois comfort. A second diptych pairs a ready-to-embroider reproduction of a Fragonard painting, Chiffre D’Amour [Love Letters] (c. early 1770s), on the left, with a copy of Roy Lichtenstein’s painting Spray (1962) to its right. The right-hand panel shows a woman’s hand depressing the nozzle of an aerosol can, which Moufarrege has rendered in glittering threads. Conceptually, it is a shout-out to the graffiti artists whose works Moufarrege so respected and admired.

On the left-hand panel we see Fragonard’s image of a woman carving initials into the trunk of a tree; atop the mass-produced image, the artist has embroidered the letters N I C K. He marks his territory as one that engages both art’s history and its most recent developments. Moufarrege’s use of readymade needlepoint canvases “further

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Title unknown (detail), 1985 Thread, pre-printed needlepoint canvas, fabric, and needlepoint canvas (two pieces) 25 x 31 inches (each) / 31 x 56 inches (overall) Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

RECOGNIZE

blurred the distinctions between art and craft, appropriation, and kitsch.”14 These paintings pose poignant questions about labor, creativity, and originality. The line between originals and copies is productively and intentionally erased by the artist.

Moufarrege doesn’t ask us to choose sides; he gives us the opportunity to have it both ways.

MY SIGN

In a posthumous appraisal of Moufarrege’s show, Rene Ricard wrote: “Nicky, I went to the opening and it was a smash. All of New York is clamoring for your work.”15 Nicolas Moufarrege’s exquisite paintings and cultural output offer a sense of his unwillingness to be constrained by limiting binary choices and cultural normativity. He dove in head first to explore new forms of creative expression that disregarded

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longstanding divisions between art and craft, assumptions about masculine and feminine tendencies, high and low culture, and geographic specificities; he upended and blended them to expose new hybrids. Moufarrege made these choices: To embroider, to celebrate male bodies and Pop Art, to combine Eastern and Western imagery and traditions, to be both insider and outsider. His unique experiences—as an expatriate; a French, Arabic, and English speaker and writer; a Lebanese citizen; a modern global citizen; an Arab; and a gay man—offer a singular opportunity to understand how these complex and layered concerns intersect and inform the work of an extremely talented, creative individual.

1 Moufarrege, Nicolas. “Another Wave, Still More Savagely than the First: Lower East Side 1982.”

Arts Magazine (September 1982).

5 Wittenberg, Debra. “Portrait of An Artist: Nicolas A. Moufarrege.” Needlepoint News (March–April 1986), p. 34.

2

6 I am deeply indebted to Mounira Al Solh and Élisabeth Lebovici for their thoughts on Moufarrege’s works. They appear in a recently published conversation: Daderko, Dean, Élisabeth Lebovici, and Mounira Al Solh.

“Prescient Stitches: The Work of Nicolas Moufarrege.” Mousse, no. 63 (April–May 2018).

Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, in 1923 France assumed colonial control of the newly formed state of Lebanon. Territorial annexation and shifting borders profoundly altered Lebanon’s demographics: while the majority of the state’s new citizens were Muslim or Druze, the new constitution guaranteed political dominance to Christian allies. Despite this, the 1960s saw Lebanon enjoying a period of relative political calm and solid economic growth. This stability came to an end with the Arab-Israeli War in 1967, when Palestinian refugees began arriving in Lebanon en masse. By 1975, the conflicts between the country’s politically and religiously diverse population came to a head, and Lebanon imploded in a 16-year long civil war that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals.

7 Lebovici in Mousse.

8 ibid.

9 Accessed online: Reichek, Elaine. http://elaine reichek.com/Project_Pages/17_EarlySewn/Early SewnWork.htm

3 Adnan, Etel. “Les masques éclatés de Nicolas

10 I am grateful to Elaine Reichek for our sustained conversation on Moufarrege’s work, which resulted in the publication of a book for Visual AIDS: Daderko, Dean and Reichek, Elaine. Duets: Nicolas A Moufarrege. New York,

Mufarrij.” Le Beyrouthin no. 8 (November 1973), p. 44–47.

4

Restany, Pierre. “Nicolas Moufarrege.”

Press release for exhibition Trames paneistes [Pantheist Frames] at Jacques Damase/Galerie de Varenne, 1980.

NY: Visual AIDS and Dancing Foxes Press, Inc., 2016.

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NICOLAS A. MOUFARREGE

11 Restany, Pierre. In “The Will-O-The Wisp from 10th Street.” Translated by Michael Slubicki. In Nicolas A. Moufarrege, exh. cat.

New York: The Clocktower and The Institute for Art and Urban Resources, 1987, p. 22.

12 Moufarrege, Nicolas. In Nicolas A. Moufarrege, exh. cat. New York: The Clocktower and

The Institute for Art and Urban Resources, 1987, p. 7.

13 Ricard, Rene. “Nicolas A. Moufarrege, 1947– 1985.” In Nicolas A. Moufarrege, exh. cat.

New York: The Clocktower and The Institute for Art and Urban Resources, 1987, p. 21.

14 Adams, Brooks. “St. Sebastian and St. Nick.”

In Nicolas A. Moufarrege, exh. cat. New York: The Clocktower and The Institute for Art and Urban Resources, 1987, p. 12.

15 Ricard, Rene. “Nicolas A. Moufarrege, 1947– 1985.” In Nicolas A. Moufarrege, exh. cat.

New York: The Clocktower and The Institute for Art and Urban Resources, 1987, p. 21.

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NICOLAS A. MOUFARREGE RECOGNIZE MY SIGN

Portrait of Nicolas Moufarrege

by Cosimo Di Leo Ricatto, 1983

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NICOLAS A. MOUFARREGE RECOGNIZE MY SIGN

No. 7, 1975 Thread on needlepoint canvas 31 3/4 × 32 3/4 inches

Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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COSMOPOLIS: ON THE CITIES OF NICOLAS MOUFARREGE

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Imagined as a line tracing his movements over time, the personal geography of Nicolas Moufarrege passes through three great cities each in their prime. The first is Alexandria, the second largest city in Egypt, located on a fabled stretch of Mediterranean coastline famous for its place in the classical world (the lighthouse, the library) and an exemplar of post-war, mid-twentieth-century modernism. It was, for a time, a city renowned for its cosmopolitan appetites and energies, for its place of refuge and the mix of religions, nationalities, and sensibilities among its residents.

Moufarrege was born in Alexandria in 1947. His parents were Lebanese émigrés who had only recently resettled there. His father, Abdallah, had lived in the United States for a while. When he returned to Lebanon, a cousin asked him to partner in a new company that was recycling old textiles, a lucrative trade in an economic boom.

Abdallah had just married a young woman whose family name was Hayek, meaning “weaver” in Arabic. It was an auspicious match. Nicolas, their first son, was born a year later, followed by Gulnar, their daughter, who arrived a year after that. Nabil, the baby brother of the family, was born in 1952—the same year King Farouk, the last of the Egyptian monarchs, was deposed in a military coup, marking the end of the city’s cosmopolitan era.

Alexandria during World War II had been one of the great escape valves of Europe. Its native-born populations were not only Egyptian, North African, Arab, and Muslim, but also Greek, Italian, French, British, Levantine, Armenian, Christian (primarily Coptic), and Jewish. Into that already dense syncretism came exiles of all kinds—cultural, spiritual, and political. One of them was the English novelist Lawrence Durrell, who had escaped from Greece via Crete to Alexandria and worked as a press attaché for the British Embassy. Durrell set the four novels of The Alexandria Quartet in the glamorously disheveled heyday of the 1940s, regarded in retrospect as the city’s golden age. Published between 1957 and 1960, the novels caught Moufarrege’s attention some 25 years later: He read them in New York in the 1980s with his great friend and downtown co-conspirator, the artist Elaine Reichek.1

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NICOLAS A. MOUFARREGE

Alexandria in its day had cafes and cabarets, an important conservatory of music, and the historic l’Atelier d’Alexandrie, where the Egyptian novelist Edwar al-Kharrat, leader of the so-called Alexandria School, wrote his first book of short stories, High Walls, in 1958, in the studio of the painter and poet Ahmed Morsi. Parisian galleries had decamped to the city to find buyers, stage exhibitions, and protect great paintings by Picasso from the war. Theater troupes and dance companies from all over Europe spent long seasons in Alexandria. Moufarrege’s sister Gulnar, known to all by her nickname Nouna, recalls going to the opera with her mother to see Madame Butterfly. She remembers having Greek and Italian friends, wearing the most current fashions, and dining on exquisite cuisine. She went to a French school, which was deemed feminine—her parents were modern but conservative—while her brothers were English-educated. But by the end of the 1950s, Alexandria was starting to falter and the city’s parents were feeling it in the schools. The coup of 1952 had brought the Free Officers political movement to power in Egypt, ushering Gamal Abdel Nasser into the presidency. He nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956 and slowly began pushing the foreigners and minorities out. In 1961, Moufarrege was sent off to boarding school in the mountains above the Lebanese capital, Beirut. The rest of the family soon followed.2 Beirut was Moufarrege’s second crucial city, and by the time he arrived, it had benefitted tremendously from Alexandria’s downfall. This was, in fact, the second time Beirut had profited from a nearby city’s loss. It had been a minor province of the Ottoman Empire before expanding into a major port in the nineteenth century. And it competed, unfavorably, with Haifa in Palestine until the creation of Israel redirected that city’s traffic and trade to Beirut. Compared to Alexandria in the mid-twentieth century, Beirut’s makeup was similarly complex but the mix was different. Lebanon was home to 18 different religious sects, the legacy of French colonialism, and a number of missionary interventions, particularly in the education system. The schools Moufarrege attended were a product of this: he went to Brummana High School, established by Swiss missionaries in 1873, and studied chemistry and architecture at the American University of Beirut (AUB), founded by American missionaries in 1866.

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The family lived in an apartment in Ras Beirut on Makdisi Street, which on one side ran parallel to the university and the Mediterranean Sea, on the other alongside the bustling commercial thoroughfares of Hamra. The neighborhood was decidedly cosmopolitan, Muslims and Christian, a jumble of the secular and devout, revolutionary and reserved, with a loose grid of tight streets making improbable space for bankers, merchants, refugees, poets, spies, performers, and eccentrics to live. In the 1960s, Ras Beirut was fueled by the energy of new ideas—and also by the availability of new funds, whether from the oil industry or foreign governments, old aristocratic families or newly successful business ventures. If the regime of Camille Chamoun, who had

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The First Time Ever I Saw the Volcano, 1979 Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 45 × 57 1/2 inches

Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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NICOLAS A. MOUFARREGE

been Lebanon’s president for most of the 1950s, was marked equally by glamour and corruption, then the years of his successor, Fouad Chehab, were notable for being one of the only moments in the country’s long history when actual state building took place, when ambitious projects inspired hope, and the idea of real progress took hold.

At the same time, all of the elements that would tear Lebanon apart in the 1970s were there, present just beneath the surface.

When he arrived at the foot of this artistic and political maelstrom, Moufarrege was a teenager, but he had already proven himself a young man of formidable intelligence, impressive in his appetite for cultural knowledge and his love of movies, music, fashion, and more. He studied chemistry at AUB but grew disillusioned with science. He went to Harvard as a Fulbright Scholar, but came back seeking direction: Cambridge and Paris are the two points on which Moufarrege’s personal geography turns. He lost his father, Abdallah, whose business in Alexandria had been ruined, leaving the elder Moufarrege a broken man, depressed and in ill health. It is unknown what kind of contact Moufarrege might have had with AUB’s art department at the time—he studied architecture briefly—but it was a forceful initiative on campus, a hothouse of experimentation thanks to a handful of professors who had been brought in from Chicago to introduce the Bauhaus to Beirut and to break the French academic style of Beaux Arts education at the same time.

Moufarrege began to draw. His works that survive from this era are colorful, outrageous, and almost charmingly psychedelic. He also began embellishing his blue jeans with embroidery, a detail that has become the myth of his artistic origin. How and when these seemingly idle activities for a busy mind transformed into a full-blown practice of tapestry painting is also unknown, but by 1975, it was there. The work was robust, geometric, abstract, labor intensive, and symbolic. But that was the year when Lebanon’s longstanding tensions and pressures erupted into a gruesome civil war.

Moufarrege couldn’t stand to be in Beirut at the time. His freedom was restricted. The city’s anxieties went into overdrive.

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Moufarrege left Beirut for Paris with a friend, the architect Michel Chidiac. For a few years he traveled between the two cities. He showed his work in Paris at the gallery of Jacques Damase, an editor with eclectic tastes ranging from the etchings of Le Corbusier to Pop Art. He befriended the French critic Pierre Restany.3 Back in Beirut, Moufarrege exhibited in less-conventional venues—in a restaurant owned by Georges Zeeni, a man of the neighborhood who had opened a legendary bar, Smuggler’s Inn, in 1974, and later ran a street festival; in a furniture showroom associated with Adnan Khashoggi, another Alexandrian son, who would later become known as a notorious Saudi arms dealer. At least once, in the late 1970s, Moufarrege made

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his way to New York and threw an elaborate dinner party in a midtown apartment he had borrowed from a friend. It was his way of announcing his imminent arrival. The photographer Peter Hujar was there, and later, back in Paris, he took one of Moufarrege’s most memorable portraits: the artist reclining, nude and forthright, a male version of Manet’s Olympia, but alone—no maid to help him—and on his own.4 By 1981, Moufarrege had indeed arrived in New York, one of several hilariously self-made debutantes who crashed like meteorites from outer space into the East Village at roughly the same time. They included the gallerists Patti Astor, Gracie Mansion, and Sur Rodney (Sur); the artists Fab 5 Freddy and Jean-Michel Basquiat; and the poet, critic, and bard of the neighborhood, Rene Ricard. The particular confluence of factors that made the East Village unique and alive and Edenic for artists in this moment has been studied ad nauseam ever since. Who knows? Somehow all the different strands of graffiti, punk, hip-hop, drag, and underground film came together in the cheap rundown storefronts of a neighborhood blasted by drugs, poverty, and neglect, lying so far east that no one seemed to care. New York had been reluctantly pulled back from the edge of bankruptcy. For a few short years there were many competing downtowns, and in the East Village, it was an exciting time for misfits and makers of bejeweled and bedazzled work. Moufarrege stuck baubles, charms, and cheap costume jewelry to much of his work, and he shared this enthusiasm for glittery materials with artists he championed and admired, such as Arch Connelly and Rhonda Zwillinger.5

Title unknown, 1983 Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 27 × 10 inches

Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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A scene took hold and flourished. Moufarrege, now in his thirties, was suddenly in the dead center of what felt like an ascendant universe. He began to write prodigiously, and his art developed quickly, spinning through several ambitious phases of appropriation and juxtaposition in quick succession. He made embroideries that were postmodern in their conception of space but also crafty in their technique and texture.

His works were deeply layered, as complex in their language of signs and symbols as he was. Everything about all of his places, his languages, his abundance of cultural references was there in the mix. He embellished his canvases with Arabic phrases, geometric Islamic patterns, and Greek letters. He pulled in boyish references to comic book figures and Pop Art. He began using dime-store needlepoint reproductions of famous French paintings. He spaced out his imagery on long scrolls of horizontal canvas, like a travelling storyteller’s sandouk. He also made diptychs and triptychs, works in dialogue with themselves.

Moufarrege did a little of everything, but it was his writing that made him famous and sought after. He was arguably the first person to write about the East Village as a scene, and he did so in dispatches for Flash Art, as if writing about some strange foreign land for his friends back home. It’s possible, however, that the writing overtook his art making, for he is better remembered as a critic, a curator, a man on the scene. Many writers who are now the elder statesman of New York art scribes, who arrived wideeyed and much younger than Moufarrege was at the time, were first attracted to the act of writing by his fulsome, effusive prose—and also by his freedom. Moufarrege was a fabulous gay man from a deeply conservative family and culture. In New York, none of that seemed to weigh on him. His work celebrated the many worlds that had made him without finding fault in any of them.

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When it came, Moufarrege’s illness was brutally quick. His health collapsed in a matter of months. He was one of the first artists in the East Village to die of AIDS, and his death left everyone around him stunned and deeply upset by his treatment in the hospital, which was egregiously poor.6 By then the art scene he loved had already imploded, regrouped, and moved on. But the AIDS crisis was profound, a deep and lasting rupture. It was also his third and final tragedy, the trauma that wrecked his milieu as others before had wrecked Alexandria and Beirut. The intensity of loss that seemed to haunt him everywhere is one of the reasons why his work is not better known or remembered; in Lebanon he remains completely unknown. But the other reason is that he packed so much into his embroideries, which are at least as rich in meaning as the masterpieces of his contemporaries who are regularly feted in museums. Viewers in his lifetime and shortly after didn’t necessarily have the tools to work through these pieces and tease out their significance. His writing can be read, in this way, as the beginning of a key to unlocking the code of his art.

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And coming to New York from Paris, Moufarrege was about as exotic as his East Village compatriots could imagine. For the majority who had never left the United States, Alexandria and Beirut lay beyond the knowable world. In New York, he was another quick-witted, fiercely intelligent, fast-moving little guy with dark hair, a funny mustache, and an incredible smile who had come from somewhere else. Worth noting, he had also turned his back on Beirut, never went back, rarely engaged the fate of Alexandria after he left. The world he had chosen wasn’t necessarily ready to read in his work the experiences of the places he’d left behind. But maybe he left them for us—to decode and read on the other side of so many tragedies and crises since, to see in them the signs of an audacious historical cosmopolitanism that was perhaps always fragile and doomed, but one that is also quite urgently needed today.

1 Daderko, Dean and Reichek, Elaine. Duets: Nicolas A Moufarrege. New York, NY: Visual AIDS and Dancing Foxes Press, Inc., 2016 2 Nouna Mufarrij in conversation with the author, Beirut, May 2, 2017.

3 Restany, Pierre. In “The Will-O-The Wisp from 10th Street.” Translated by Michael Slubicki.

In Nicolas A. Moufarrege, exh. cat. New York: The Clocktower and The Institute for Art and Urban Resources, 1987, p. 22.

4 Philip Gefter, Joel Smith, Steve Turtell and Martha Scott Burton. Peter Hujar: Speed of Life, exh. cat. New York: Aperture and Fundación MAPFRE, 2017.

5 Sur Rodney (Sur) in conversation with the author, New York, June 8, 2018.

6 Cynthia Carr and Hope Sandrow in conversation with the author, New York, March 9, 2018, and June 17, 2018.

NICOLAS

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MOUFARREGE

Le chemin [The Way], 1975 Thread on needlepoint canvas Le sang du phenix [The Blood of the Phoenix], nd 23 1/2 × 36 inches Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij 49 7/8 x 64 inches Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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MY

MY

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MOUFARREGE

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MOUFARREGE

Nikki, 1976 57 × 64 inches

Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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MY

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NICOLAS

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MOUFARREGE

Le sang du phenix [The Blood of the Phoenix], nd 49 7/8 x 64 inches

Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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MY

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NICOLAS

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Le sang du phénix [The Blood of the Phoenix], 1975 50 × 64 inches

Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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MY

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NICOLAS

A.

MOUFARREGE

Le sang du phenix [The Blood of the Phoenix], nd 49 7/8 x 64 inches

Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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MY

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NICOLAS

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NICOLAS A. MOUFARREGE RECOGNIZE MY SIGN

First Step into the Pyramid, 1979 and detail (left) Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 57 1/2 × 45 inches

Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

NICOLAS A. MOUFARREGE RECOGNIZE MY SIGN

Languages, 1980 Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 18 × 15 inches

Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

NICOLAS

A.

MOUFARREGE

Le sang du phenix [The Blood of the Phoenix], nd 49 7/8 x 64 inches

Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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MY

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Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas

Title unknown, n.d.

Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

28 3/4 × 23 3/4 inches

NICOLAS

A.

MOUFARREGE

The Fifth Day, 1980 51 × 64 inches

Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas Collection George Waterman III

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MY

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NICOLAS

A.

MOUFARREGE

Le sang du phenix [The Blood of the Phoenix], nd 49 7/8 x 64 inches

Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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MY

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50

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Title unknown, n.d.

Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 57 1/2 × 45 inches

Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

NICOLAS

A.

MOUFARREGE

Le sang du phenix [The Blood of the Phoenix], nd 49 7/8 x 64 inches

Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas

Edward Brad Munch, 1984

Collection Bradley and Holly Cole, Wichita, Kansas

40 × 32 inches

NICOLAS

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MOUFARREGE

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NICOLAS

A.

MOUFARREGE

Le sang du phenix [The Blood of the Phoenix], nd 49 7/8 x 64 inches

Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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MY

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Thread, pre-printed needlepoint canvas, fabric,

Title unknown, 1985

and needlepoint canvas (two pieces)

Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

18 × 31 inches (each)

NICOLAS A. MOUFARREGE RECOGNIZE MY SIGN

Upper The Truth About John The Baptist, 1983 Thread, pigment, glitter, and brooches on needlepoint canvas 19 3/4 × 72 inches

Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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NICOLAS A. MOUFARREGE RECOGNIZE MY SIGN

Lower Narcissix of One and Nick’s of the Other, 1983 Thread, pigment, glitter, beads, minerals, and adhesive on needlepoint canvas 18 × 84 inches

Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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NICOLAS A. MOUFARREGE

Le sang du phenix [The Blood of the Phoenix], nd

49 7/8 x 64 inches

Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas

Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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Narcissix of One and Nick’s of the Other, (detail), 1983 Thread, pigment, glitter, beads, minerals, and adhesive on needlepoint canvas 18 x 84 inches Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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MOUFARREGE

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MOUFARREGE

Title unknown, 1985 32 × 40 inches

Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas Collection Pavel Zoubok, New York, New York

Le sang du phenix [The Blood of the Phoenix], nd 49 7/8 x 64 inches

Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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CATALOGUE OF THE EXHIBITION

Unless otherwise noted, all works appear courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij, Shreveport, Louisiana.

A. MOUFARREGE

In dimensions, height precedes width.

Le chemin [The Way], 1975 Thread on needlepoint canvas 23 1/2 × 36 inches

Languages, 1980 Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 18 × 15 inches

Le sang du phénix [The Blood of the Phoenix], 1975 Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 50 × 64 inches

Laocoön Quest, 1980 Cotton, silk, wool, and pigment on needlepoint canvas 39 1/2 × 32 inches

No. 7, 1975 Thread on needlepoint canvas 31 3/4 × 32 3/4 inches Une Ile [An Island], 1975 Thread on needlepoint canvas 21 1/2 × 29 inches Nikki, 1976 Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 57 × 64 inches

RECOGNIZE

First Step into the Pyramid, 1979 Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 57 1/2 x 45 inches The First Time Ever I Saw the Volcano, 1979 Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 45 × 57 1/2 inches

MY SIGN

The Importance of Being Evergreen, 1979–80 Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 44 × 64 inches

The Fifth Day, 1980 Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 51 × 64 inches Collection George Waterman III Mission Impossible, 1983 Thread, pigment, glitter, and brooches on needlepoint canvas 18 × 72 inches Narcissix of One and Nick’s of the Other, 1983 Thread, pigment, glitter, beads, minerals, and adhesive on needlepoint canvas 18 × 84 inches Somewhere Else to Go, 1983 Thread, pigment, glitter, beads, adhesive, and brooches on needlepoint canvas 18 × 72 inches The Truth About John the Baptist, 1983 Thread, pigment, glitter, and brooches on needlepoint canvas 19 3/4 × 72 inches

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NICOLAS A.

The Weather Last Tuesday, 1983 Thread, pigment, glitter, beads, and adhesive on needlepoint canvas 18 × 96 inches

MOUFARREGE

Title unknown, 1983 Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 26 × 19 inches Collection Tim Cone, Washington, DC Title unknown, 1983 Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 27 × 10 inches Edward Brad Munch, 1984 Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 40 × 32 inches Collection Bradley and Holly Cole, Wichita, Kansas Title unknown, 1984 Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 39 1/2 × 32 inches Title unknown, 1984 Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 39 1/2 × 32 inches Title unknown, 1984–85 Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 39 1/2 × 32 inches Music, 1985 Thread, pre-printed needlepoint canvas, fabric, and needlepoint canvas (two pieces) 36 × 62 inches (overall) Collection Tim Cone, Washington, DC

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Title unknown, 1985 Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 32 × 40 inches Collection Pavel Zoubok, New York, New York

MY SIGN

Title unknown, 1985 Thread on needlepoint canvas 18 x 54 inches

Title unknown, 1985 Thread on needlepoint canvas 12 × 18 inches Title unknown, 1985 Thread on needlepoint canvas 12 × 18 inches Title unknown, 1985 Thread, pre-printed needlepoint canvas, fabric, and needlepoint canvas (two pieces) 18 × 62 inches (overall) Title unknown, 1985 Thread, pre-printed needlepoint canvas, fabric, and needlepoint canvas (two pieces) 31 × 56 inches (overall) Title unknown, n.d.

Thread on needlepoint canvas 19 × 16 1/2 inches Title unknown, n.d.

Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 28 3/4 × 23 3/4 inches Title unknown, n.d.

Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 57 1/2 × 45 inches Title unknown, n.d.

Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas 51 1/4 × 38 1/4 inches Title unknown, n.d.

Thread, pigment, glitter, beads, adhesive, and brooches on needlepoint canvas 18 × 96 inches Title unknown, n.d.

Thread on needlepoint canvas 24 × 28 1/2 inches Artist’s photocopies, n.d.

Various sizes Artist’s portfolio, n.d.

Various materials 10 × 13 inches

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NICOLAS A.

Book owned by the artist Diane Waldman, Roy Lichtenstein: Drawings and Prints, 1969 Offset on paper 10 × 13 inches

MOUFARREGE

Book owned by the artist Diane Waldman, Roy Lichtenstein, 1971 Offset on paper 12 × 12 inches

Photocopies with artist’s sketches, n.d.

Ink on photocopies Various sizes Postcard with artist’s sketch, n.d.

Ink on postcard 4 1/4 × 6 inches Untitled drawing, n.d.

Marker on paper 11 × 9 inches

Embroidered patch, n.d.

Thread and beads on denim 12 × 8 1/2 inches

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This exhibition would not have been possible without the generosity and longstanding support of Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij and Dr. Nabil and Hanan Moufarrej and their family. My gratitude to them is immense.

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I would also like to thank the following individuals whose conversations and contributions over distant and recent years contributed to the development of this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue: Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal; Mounira Al Solh; Omar Calvin; Valerie Cassel-Oliver; Carla Chammas and Leslie Nasr; Bradley and Holly Cole; Michèle Cone; Tim Cone; Lynne Cooke; Alex Fialho, Programs Director and Esther McGowan, Executive Director, Visual AIDS; Max Fields; Larissa Harris, Curator and Hitomi Iwasaki, Director of Exhibitions and Curator, Queens Museum; Carissa Hempton; Alhena Katsof; Jennifer Kikoler; Élisabeth Lebovici; Karim Makarem; Khalil Moufarrege; Ulrike Müller; Marie Muracciole; Chuck Nanney; Emily Peacock; Elaine Reichek; Amy Sadao; Khaled Salem; Rayya Salem; Nelson Santos; Andrew Schirrmeister; Nada Shabout; George H. Waterman III; Kaelen Wilson-Goldie; and Pavel Zoubok.

MY SIGN

As always, I am indebted to my many talented and capable colleagues at CAMH, and especially to Exhibitions Manager and Assistant Curator Patricia Restrepo and Head Preparator Jeff Shore.

This catalogue is dedicated to A.K. and N.M. — Dean Daderko

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CAMH

STAFF

Allan Aguilar Accounting Assistant

Dean Daderko Curator

Sanjuana Banda Graphic Designer

Laura Dickey Curatorial Administrative Assistant

Tim Barkley Registrar Adrianna Benavides Tour Programs Coordinator

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Quincy Berry Assistant Gallery Supervisor

MY

Christina Brungardt Interim Director

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Felice Cleveland Director of Education and Public Programs

Kenya Evans Gallery Supervisor Jordan Fields Gift Processing Coordinator Lauren Gadson Museum Shop Assistant Manager Sidney Mori Garrett Communications Assistant

Ara Griffith Senior Grants Coordinator

Sue Pruden Director of Retail Operations

Monica Hoffman Controller

Mike Reed Assistant Director of Facilities and Risk Management

Bridget Hovell Membership Coordinator Deborah B. Lackey, CFRE Chief Advancement Officer Kristin Massa Videographer Beth PerĂŠ Senior Special Events and Sponsorships Coordinator

Patricia Restrepo Exhibitions Manager and Assistant Curator Jeff Shore Head Preparator Michael Simmonds Teen Council and Public Programs Coordinator Kent Michael Smith Director of Communications and Marketing

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Jereann Chaney, Chair Dillon Kyle, President Howard Robinson, Vice President Ruth Dreessen, Treasurer Louise Jamail, Secretary Liz Anders Allison Armstrong Ayers Candace Baggett Vera Baker James M. Bell, Jr. Estela Cockrell Margaret Vaughan Cox Haydeh Davoudi Blakely Griggs Melissa Kepke Grobmyer Catherine Baen Hennessy Kerry Inman Bryn Larsen Erica Levit Marian Livingston Lucinda Loya Catherine Masterson Libbie Masterson Elisabeth McCabe Greg McCord Mac McManus Floyd Newsum Cabrina Owsley Elisa Stude Pye Nicholas Silvers David P. Young

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Chinhui Juhn and Eddie Allen The Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston George and Mary Josephine Hamman Foundation Leslie and Mark Hull Sissy and Denny Kempner KPMG, LLP The Sarofim Foundation Louisa Stude Sarofim Robin and Andrew Schirrmeister Wallace S. Wilson Michael Zilkha

ARTIST—BENEFACTORS:

Andisheh Avini, Chris Beckman, Rhona Bitner, Robert Bordo, Billy Childish, Mel Chin, Holly Coulis, James Drake, Mark Flood, Wayne Gilbert, Roberta Harris, Camille Henrot, Oliver Herring, Jenny Holzer, David Kelley, Georgia Marsh, Marilyn Minter, Nic Nicosia, Angel Otero, Joyce Pensato, Susie Rosmarin, Bret Shirley, Peter Sullivan, Mary Weatherford, Carrie Mae Weems, Guy Yanai, and Haegue Yang

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Contemporary Arts Museum Houston November 10, 2018–February 17, 2019 Queens Museum October 6, 2019–February 16, 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston 5216 Montrose Boulevard Houston, Texas 77006 Copyright © 2018 by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston ISBN: 978-1-933619-73-6 For the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston: Catalogue coordinator: Patricia Restrepo Editor: Jennifer Kikoler Design: NUU Group Printing: Printyard Photography: Neil Johnson for Visual AIDS, New York—pages 12, 14, 17, 18, 21, 22, 26, 29, 30, 33, 35, 38–43, 45–51, 52–53, 54–55, 56–57, and 58–59 Emily Peacock—inside back cover, pages 1–8 Typography composed in Bagatela, Eczar, and Space Mono

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Cover: Title unknown (detail), 1984 and Le sang du phénix [The Blood of the Phoenix] (detail), 1975 Thread and pigment on needlepoint canvas Courtesy Nabil Moufarrej and Gulnar “Nouna” Mufarrij

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