AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF BEIRUT ART GALLERIES
2012-
AUB Art Galleries and Collections was established in 2012. Since then this university program at one of the oldest and most prestigious institutions of liberal education in the Middle East has produced a number of exhibitions, conferences and publications. The program includes two galleries: AUB Byblos Bank Art Gallery and AUB Rose and Shaheen Saleeby Museum located in Hamra district. In addition the program cares for the university art collection that includes works by the major Lebanese modern artists such as Khalil Saleeby (1870-1928), Cesar Gemayal (1898-1958), Omar Onsi (1901-1969), Saliba Douaihy (1912-1994) and others. The events produced by the galleries are approved by an art steering committee which function under the provost of AUB.
Proposal for AUB Byblos Bank Gallery facade by Reza Abedini
The Soros Center for Contemporary Art, or SCCA Chișinău opened its office in the spring of 1996. The center was part of a larger system of centers which together formed the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCA) Network. This Network was a regional project of the Open Society Institute launched by George Soros and the Soros Foundation in most of the postsocialist countries and republics of the former USSR. Its mission was not only to modernize artistic discourse by encouraging the most innovative art forms, or by facilitating access to information about the most recent Western art, but also to promote artists and help them join Western art world circuits and markets. The SCCA Network, which grew out of a small documentation program initiated in Budapest, Hungary in 1985, spread out widely during the 1990s, leading to the opening of twenty SCCAs in most of the administrative or cultural capitals of the countries once behind the Iron Curtain. The link on the right leads to the old website of SCCA Chisinau, with its major projects: four annual and other smaller scale exhibitions, as well as other information on the activities of this center from the mid to the end of the 1990s.
1. For a more detailed discussion of the Soros art network see Esanu, The postsocialist contemporary: the institutionalization of artistic practice in Eastern Europe after 1989.
The logo of SCCA-Chisinau