Iraqi artists show in Manhattan
Mohammed al-Hamdany's 25-panel painting Night of Fire depicts what was known in the West as Shock and Awe
In a side street of Soho, at a gallery aptly named Pomegranate, an interesting coincidence of circumstances has led a US Marine to bring Iraqi art to Manhattan.
It began when Christopher Brownfield, then a US Marine, was stationed as a military liaison officer in Baghdad's Green Zone.
As well as being the location of the US embassy and the Iraqi parliament, the Green Zone is also home to several thousand Baghdad residents.
They lived there before the area was cordoned off to become the heavily protected zone it is now.
The US Marine was in search of a tie, and happened to go into a souvenir shop selling Iraqi tat for the soldiers - tourist paintings, Persian rugs and hookah pipes.
"After two or three months of knowing these people, they started bringing in really good paintings, ones that they were not selling in the tourist shops" Christopher Brownfield Former Marine
It did not look a promising venue for finding a tie or fascinating Iraqi modern art. However, he got talking to the vendors and discovered a serious interest in art.
"When I started talking to the people in the shop I found they knew a lot about art. Many of them had university degrees in fine art, and they wanted to know more about American art," Mr Brownfield said.
"So we started this cultural exchange, where I would bring books on American art and they would get books about Iraqi art and that sort of started a friendship between us."
It was a friendship that developed using the books to communicate.
Trust
"There were constraints in that my Arabic was abysmal, and their English was quite limited. So we would frequently use books with various artists from Europe or America to describe what people were trying to do," Mr Brownfield said.
Brownfield smuggled the art through the US military's postal service
The artists were struggling to feed their families, barely surviving by painting "Lawrence of Arabia" style pieces popular among the soldiers.
The artwork they were showing the Marine was very different. It documented the violence and chaos around them.
"After two or three months of knowing these people, they started bringing in really good paintings, ones that they were not selling in the tourist shops."
The quality and sheer volume of the pieces motivated Mr Brownfield to make an offer: "Let me take this to the US and try and exhibit it, try and sell it."
Smuggling
After months of dialogue, the artists agreed to take the risk.
"It took me quite some time to build up enough trust that they would bring in these gallery pieces and ask me to take them to the US. It probably took seven or eight months before they were willing to trust me to do that."
This was no mean feat. Iraqis working with Americans have been labelled traitors by the insurgency and many have been killed.
"He [the artist] can't help but feel torn between, welcoming Americans and hating the chaos of everything he sees around him" Christopher Brownfield
However, once the step was taken, the problem then was how to get about 100 canvases out of Iraq.
The solution was a nifty exercise in smuggling. Mr Brownfield used the US military's postal service.
"The logistics were a bit of a challenge. I did have to violate some postal regulations to do this."
"Technically we're not allowed to send other people's property through the mail. So I ended up having to lie on the customs forms."
'Night of Fire'
Amazingly the works all arrived safely.
Now they are sitting proudly in the Pomegranate gallery. Not all the canvases are there, however - there are simply too many to show.
Pride of place has been given to a 25-panel painting by Mohammed al-Hamdany. It is called Laylat al-Nar or The Night of Fire.
"The series Night of Fire gets its name from the time of the invasion in 2003, when everyone in the US and the Western media was calling it the Shock and Awe campaign," explains Mr Brownfield.
The centrepiece of the work is a painting showing the fall of the statue of Saddam Hussein, the symbolic moment which promised Iraqis freedom from the past.
The various canvases are an explosion of reds and blacks, showing people staring out from apartment windows at the violence on the streets.
Mohammed al-Hamdany's elder brother was a senior government minister who was killed under Saddam's regime. However the paintings show ambivalence toward the US-led occupation.
"Because it's so chaotic and violent... he can't help but feel torn between welcoming Americans and hating the chaos of everything he sees around him."
The exhibition is not cutting-edge, avant-garde art. The marine-turned-art dealer says the country has lived in a cultural bubble with too few external influences to be able to bring something new to the arts circuit.
However, the exhibition is a powerful account of the artists' experiences of the past few years of living with war and violence.
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