Jawad Saleem

It was the, one of the pioneers of the Iraqi art movement.

His name was Jawad Saleem.

And, uh, he was really interesting because he was educated in the West, but he went back to Iraq and really was like, "I'm gonna decolonize [laughs] all of this, you know, Western education that I got.

And instead of only looking to the Picassos and the Michelangelos and the Leonardo da Vincis, I'm gonna look at the Mesopotamian civilization and the Sumerians and, you know, the contributions that my part of the world has done." One of the things that he wrote in the manifesto for the Baghdad Modern Art Group was he...

It's a quote.

So he goes, "Now, before I forget, I would like to remind you of something you hear often.

'Hey, come on, we wanna eat bread.'" And so it's this idea that artists, the starving artist, you know, is always, you know, in this position where they have to either work themselves to the core, uh, which is actually what happened to Jawad Saleem.

He died of a heart attack on site of working on the biggest project he had ever gotten commissioned for, and it's the, still till today, the heart of Baghdad.