The discussion of women, gender, the visual arts, and artists in the central Arab states should be tied to a critical understanding of the role of aesthetics and gender in colonial encounters. While women in these states have long been associated with artistic production in various roles, the professionalization of the role of artist is a relatively recent phenomenon, and its value for analyzing the status of both women and the nation-states they are taken to represent must be scrutinized through a historical lens.

The Western academy's interest in women as artists in the East …