Kamal J. Boullata

If you move around Washington's Arab American community for a while, it doesn't take long for you to become very aware of Kamal Boullata.

When you pick up your program at a benefit concert for the children of Lebanon, you see his name staring up at you from the program's cover—"Kamal Boullata, Designer." Go to a reading of Arab American poets protesting the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, and you find that the book of poems that goes with the reading has been edited and illustrated by Kamal Boullata. Are you planning to join a demonstration urging, say, a saner U.S. policy towards the Middle East? Chances are good that you will be walking behind a placard that is one of Mr. Boullata's creations.

Investigate a bit and you may also discover that he has practically cornered the market on making logos for Arab American groups. He designed the one first used by the National Association of Arab Americans. Since then, he has designed the logos of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Association of Arab-American University Graduates, the Palestine Human Rights Campaign and the Palestine Congress of North America, among others. He has also done logos for a number of business concerns.

Identity Problem?

From all of this you will conclude that Mr. Boullata is a Palestinian American, a political activist, and a graphics designer. But you would be only partly right. If you stick around longer you learn that he is a lot more.

"So many people know me only for my graphics design work," he says a bit ruefully. "But that is something I do on the side. My main work is painting and writing." He is also a translator and art critic, and is the Program Director for the Arab American Cultural Foundation.

Mr. Boullata, now 42, has suffered from an identity problem not only with regard to how he is looked upon by the outside world, but with how he sees himself. "For years, I went from writing to painting and back again," he says. "I wasn't sure what I really wanted to concentrate on."

He solved this dilemma eventually by using phrases—often from the Koran—as the focal point for his paintings. "I have been doing this to some extent for 20 years," he says, "believing that the words on canvas created something that was visually interesting. But within the past three years the words have become predominant and taken over the whole space within which I work." Painting is now so clearly his thing that even the writing that he does away from the canvas consists mainly, these days, of criticism of the visual arts.

Mr. Boullata's works are designed to be stimulating both to the eye and the intellect. For example, a silk-screen painting which until recently hung in a one-man show was formed by the Arabic words meaning, "Glory Be to the Creator." There is one color which keeps changing, the farther away from it that you go. You begin with purple, and by the time you have backed into the middle of the gallery it has become yellow. Mr. Boullata wants the picture to become a "focus of contemplation," which will make the viewer wonder: who is the creator of this beautiful change of color? Is it God? Or the artist? Or is it just the light in the room?

Over the years, paintings by Mr. Boullata have been exhibited not only in Washington and other places in North America, but also in London, Rome, Paris, Berlin, Moscow and Tokyo, as well as in cities of the Middle East and North Africa.

Responding to Tragedy

Mr. Boullata's political activism comes naturally: "All my life has been the product of a political tragedy," he says—i.e., the Israeli takeover of Palestine, including his native city of Jerusalem- and to make any meaning for my life I have to respond politically."

He has no interest, however, in joining a political faction or lobby. While he is willing to provide a variety of them with his skills as a graphics designer, he wants his own political statements to be made through the medium of Arab culture.

"The assertion of one's culture is a political statement," he says. "I believe I do this through my own painting and through my work at the Arab American Cultural Foundation, which helps to increase the understanding of Arabs as people."

Mr. Boullata also teaches courses at Georgetown University. These have included "Modern Arab Fiction," "Art in the Arab World," and "the Gestalt of Arab Culture."

In case you're still not convinced that Mr. Boullata is creative: in the course on Arab culture he brought a belly-dancer into the classroom (videotaping her performance for future discussion and analysis) because "the very movements around her navel, which go in a concentric motion, are very much the same pattern as the lines in an arabesque. In fact, you see the same rhythms in the structure of an Arabic poem."

Mr. Boullata studied art at the University of London, the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, and the Corcoran Art Museum School in Washington, D.C. He has lived in Washington since 1968. He is married to Lily Farhoud, who is writing a doctoral dissertation on 19th-century Oriental painters.