Holiday Powers

Holiday Powers is Assistant Professor of Global Modern and Contemporary Art History at VCUarts Qatar, where her research and teaching emphasize art in the Arab world. She received her PhD in 2015 from Cornell University. Her first book, Moroccan Modernism, is forthcoming in the New African Histories series from Ohio University Press. Her research emphasizes the articulation of local and transnational discourses in modern and contemporary art, particularly within the Arab world, from the perspective of postcolonial and feminist theory. She has contributed to publications including Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art and the Journal of North African Studies, as well as provided book chapters for publications including Under the Skin: Feminist Art from the Middle East and North Africa Today (Oxford Academic Books, 2020). She has also written encyclopedia entries for Grove Art Online, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, and the Mathaf Encyclopedia of Modern Art and the Arab World. She has been active in contemporary art, including in her role as Artistic Program Coordinator and Parallel Projects for the Marrakech Biennale 5, and has curated two exhibitions for the VCUarts Qatar gallery.

Contributions

Africa | Art and Gender
Opening the Path for a Feminine Abstraction: Malika Agueznay and the Casablanca School
Malika Agueznay was among the first woman modernist abstract artists in Morocco. She was a student at the Casablanca École des Beaux-Arts from 1966 to 1970, during the experimental tenure of the faculty known as the Casablanca School. Shaped by the formative experience within the school, she has also distinguished herself by the ways her research emphasizes her female identity. Throughout her career, she has elaborated on seaweed as a central motif in her abstract practice. This motif is both deliberately evocative of femininity and rooted in her own female perspective.