Description

---

Working with stylized typographic and calligraphic forms, Egyptian-Lebanese street artist Bahia Shehab brings creative presentations of language and culture to public spaces around the world. During the Egyptian revolution of 2011, she began taking to the streets to paint. Starting in Cairo, Shehab began creating large-scale public art as a form of resistance against military rule and violence. With her spray can in hand, this artist, designer, and historian set out to spread beautiful and empowering images in the face of tumultuous times. Now she has taken her peaceful resistance to the streets of the world, creating works in cities from New York to Tokyo, Amsterdam, and Honolulu. Engaging with identity and the preservation of cultural heritage, Shehab creates work that investigates Islamic art history and reinterprets contemporary Arab politics, feminist discourse, and social issues. Internationally renowned, Shehab’s work has been on display in exhibitions, galleries, and city streets across the world and has earned her a number of international recognitions and awards, including the BBC 100 Women list, TED Senior fellowship, and a Prince Claus Award. In 2016, she became the first Arab woman to receive the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture.

At the Corner of a Dream offers extensive documentation of Shehab’s powerful street paintings. It also chronicles the stories of the people she meets along her journeys and includes her observations from the streets of each new city she visits. Shehab’s work is a manifesto, a cry for freedom and dignity, and a call to never stop dreaming.
 

About the Author

---

Bahia Shehab is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, art historian, and professor of design and founder of the graphic design program at the American University in Cairo. Her artwork has been displayed globally, and it was the subject of the 2015 documentary film “Nefertiti’s Daughters.” Her publications include A Thousand Times No: The Visual History of Lam-alif, At The Corner of a Dream, and A History of Arab Graphic Design.

Praise For…

---

"Shehab uses the past to shed new light on the present and inspires the next generation of academics and graphic designers." 
— Prince Claus Fund, The Netherlands

"Shehab's book At the Corner of a Dream tracks her journey from Tahrir Square across the world,and documents her stencils on the walls of fifteen cities.... By showing art in practice, being made an in use, Shehab's photographs go beyond the static documentation of a work of art.... [In] her conclusion, Shehab writes: 'when you are on a journey, it is other people who end up becoming your home [...] Home becomes an idea that we can create anywhere.' In the midst of her documentation of violence, dispossession and exile, resistance is explicitly linked to hospitality."
— Burlington Contemporary