Fez — A new exhibition in New York is looking back at a period when the Moroccan coastal city of Asilah became an international meeting point for artists, printmakers, poets, musicians, and intellectuals.
“Asilah Oui: Robert Blackburn in Morocco” opened at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in Manhattan on September 19 and will continue through December 12.
The exhibition explores the first decade of the Asilah Cultural Moussem, founded in 1978 by Moroccan artist Mohamed Melehi and diplomat Mohamed Benaïssa.
Rather than presenting the festival only through its better-known murals and public art, the New York exhibition digs into the networks that formed around printmaking and artistic exchange.
Asilah meets New York
Curated by Imani Congdon with the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, the exhibition brings together prints, photographs, and archival material, including pieces from private collections that have never previously been exhibited.
The workshop describes the show as an examination of the connection between Blackburn’s New York printmaking community and the international artists who gathered in Asilah during the Moussem’s formative years.
The participating artists span several countries and generations.
Moroccan figures include Mohamed Melehi, Malika Agueznay, Farid Belkahia, Abderrahmane Rahoule, Abbès Saladi, and Kamal Boutaleb. They appear alongside artists including Etel Adnan, Simone Fattal, Mohammad Omer Khalil, Zarina, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, and Robert Blackburn himself.
The story at the center of “Asilah Oui” is therefore not simply one of Moroccan art traveling abroad. It is about Asilah functioning as a place where artists from different backgrounds worked alongside one another and shared techniques, ideas, and creative spaces.
The Moussem grew from ideas associated with the Casablanca School, particularly the belief that art should move beyond galleries and enter public life.
A history still unfolding
The exhibition will extend beyond the gallery later this year.
On November 7, the project will continue at New York’s Anthology Film Archives with a screening pairing Shalom Gorewitz’s 1984 film “Melehi” with Hisham Aïdi’s 2023 documentary “A Thousand and One Berber Nights.”
The films examine two Moroccan artists whose careers developed through international cultural networks: Melehi and dancer, actor, and choreographer Hassan Ouakrim.
Nearly five decades after the first Asilah Cultural Moussem, the New York exhibition shows how far the relationships created there traveled.
It also places a Moroccan cultural experiment inside a broader history of international contemporary art, reminding audiences that Asilah was not only receiving global artistic movements. It was helping create them.
