Mohamed Melehi (1936-2020)

Born in 1936 in Asilah, this leader of the modernist renaissance in Morocco was a professor at the Casablanca School of Fine Arts from 1964, then became Director of Arts at the Ministry of Culture from 1984 to 1992. He died from Covid-19 this Wednesday in Paris, where he was hospitalized. 

The Swedish artist, who contentiously drew the Prophet Mohammed as a dog, has died due to a car accident. Since the publication of the drawing in 2007, he has been under police protection due to continued death threats, including a $150,000 bounty issued by the al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq.

A work by Algerian artist Mohamed Bourouissa (represented by Kamel Mennour) will illustrate a new stamp to be released on 12 October, as part of the French Post’s artist series. Zamer (2016), Bourouissa explains, is a portrait that makes visible "all the faces that have until now been left out of official imagery."

The winning installation Free Trade was first sprawled across a Monoprix floor during Les Rencontres d’Arles last year, and is now at The Photographers’ Gallery in London until 20 September. Bourouissa’s mixed-media, photography and sculpture works communicate the precarity of those most marginalised in French society.

Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians — The Mohammed Akfami Collection is on view at the Asia Society in Manhattan until May 8, 2022. It seeks to combat the prevalent notion of Iran as a “hostile anti-American state”, and instead celebrate the “great diversity” of Iran’s rarely seen art scene. (

Created for the Dubai Future Foundation, the museum’s exterior is largely complete. Created by Killa Design and Buro Happold, the sustainable building is covered in calligraphy forming a poem by Dubai’s Sheikh Mohammed. The museum will exhibit innovative and design and “catalyze pioneering concepts.” (Dezeen)

The pop-up sculpture displayed on the National Mall on the 36th birthday of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—a message reading “Dear Clown Prince, thousands of your victims wish you a damned birthday” was scrawled in bleeding red paint over a list of the country’s over 140 prisoners of conscience. (Hyperallergic)

With Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman shutting off sources of money with which Saudi princes had funded their lavish lifestyles, they have been selling assets worth over $600M such as real estate, yachts and artwork. This may also be a way of making their wealth less visible to avoid the Crown Prince’s attention. (WSJ)

Sales of the new coloring book, featuring fresh drawings from over 50 emerging and established artists, will support Azikiwe Mohammed’s project of creating a free school of Black art history. ‘Drawings for the Black Painters Academy’ is available for online download. (Hyperallergic)

The Mohamed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, in Rabat, opens this Wednesday with an exhibition on Eugene Delacroix’s 1882 journey through Morocco and Algeria. It explores the influence the trip had on the painter, through approximately thirty of his works. (El País)