Jun 13, 2023, 6:30 PM – 8 PM

In Conversation:
Form and Innovation in the Art
and Writing of Kahlil Gibran

Kahlil Gibran, "The Summit," c. 1925. Watercolor and pencil on paper, 11 x 8 1/2 inches (27.9 x 21.6 cm). Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia, Gift of Mary Haskell Minis. Photography by Erwin Gaspin — Kahlil Gibran, *The Summit*, c. 1925. Watercolor and pencil on paper, 11 x 8 1/2 inches (27.9 x 21.6 cm). Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia, Gift of Mary Haskell Minis. Photography by Erwin Gaspin

Join Art Historian Anneka Lenssen and Professor of Arabic Literature Huda Fakhreddine with curator Claire Gilman to discuss the formal innovation and influence in the work of Kahlil Gibran.

The ﬁrst exhibition of its kind in the United States, A Greater Beauty: The Drawings of Kahlil Gibran features over one hundred drawings by the proliﬁc Lebanese-American artist, poet and essayist, and coincides with the 100th anniversary of Gibran’s world-renowned publication The Prophet. Though best known for his poetry and prose, Gibran viewed himself equally as a visual artist, producing paintings, watercolors, sketches, illustrations, book covers, and other material as a complement to his written work. A Greater Beauty presents an overview of Gibran’s drawings and sketches alongside manuscript pages, notebooks, correspondence, magazine illustrations and essays, and ﬁrst editions, providing a glimpse into the artist’s production in the context of his work as a whole.

Huda Fakhreddine

Huda Fakhreddine is associate professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). She is the co-translator of Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA editions, 2017), The Sky That Denied Me: Selections from Jawdat Fakhreddine (University of Texas Press, 2020), and Come, Take a Gentle Stab: Selections from Salim Barakat (forthcoming from Seagull Books, 2021). Her book of creative non-fiction titled Zaman s̩aghīr taḥt shams thāniya (A Small Time under a Different Sun) was published by Dar al-Nahda, Beirut in 2019. She is the co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures and an editor of the Library of Arabic Literature.
Kahlil Gibran

Kahlil Gibran was born Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān in Ottoman-ruled Bsharri in 1883 to a Maronite Christian family. In 1895, Gibran’s mother moved him, his half-brother, and two younger sisters to Boston, where she worked as a pack peddler, leaving Gibran’s father in Lebanon. Displaying an aptitude for the arts at an early age, Kahlil Gibran was supported in his endeavors by key mentors throughout his life. As a teenager, Gibran met photographer, publisher, and philanthropist Fred Holland Day and poet Josephine Preston Peabody, both of whom provided Gibran with his entrance into Boston’s creative community. Day hosted the first solo exhibition of Gibran’s drawings in 1904 in his Boston photo studio shortly after Gibran returned from Beirut, where he attended college. At that event, Gibran met Mary Haskell, who would become a lifelong friend (there is speculation that the two were also romantically involved) and benefactor to Gibran, paying for him to attend the Academie Julian art school in Paris from 1908 to 1910. While in Paris, Gibran became involved with Syrian political dissidents, whose activities he continued to support upon his return to the United States. Gibran’s artwork was shown in 1914 at Montross Gallery and in 1917 at the galleries of M. Knoedler & Co, both in New York. In 1923, Gibran published his best-known written work The Prophet, an anthology of poems that captured the attention of the world and eventually made Gibran the best-selling American poet of the twentieth century. On April 10, 1931, at the age of forty-eight, Gibran died of liver disease in his home on West 10th Street in New York City. He was buried in Bsharri on the grounds of what is now the Gibran Museum.
Claire Gilman
Annika Lenssen

Anneka Lenssen is associate professor of global modern art in the department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (UC Press, 2020), which won the 2021 Syrian Studies Association Book Prize and was shortlisted for the MSA Book Prize, and co-editor of Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (MoMA, 2018). She is an art editor for Critical Times and serves on the editorial boards of Representations and ARTMargins.