In “Niyū Yūrk,” New York Public Library shares a glimpse of Middle East and North Africa communities in the city: An interview with curator Hiba Abid

2026-03-05 - 15:54

Public Library documenting the history of MENA immigration to New York City and how those communities flourished despite challenges and widespread misconceptions. Closing March 8, the show highlights art, music, books and other materials from NYPL’s collections representing several MENA diasporas present in the city, including Armenians. Notably, the pieces are presented with crucial context about what life was really like for these immigrants. The exhibition is the brainchild of Hiba Abid, curator for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the New York Public Library. She not only scoured NYPL collections for materials to showcase but also relied on community members and local organizations for guidance and cultural knowledge. We caught up with Abid following a visit to the library to discuss the show’s origins, NYPL’s broader Middle Eastern collections and why it was important to include Armenians in this exhibition. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. R.N.: You’re the curator for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the New York Public Library. What does your role entail? What drew you to this work? H.A.: I am from Tunisia and studied in France and other places in Europe. I have a Ph.D. in Islamic art history and codicology, and I worked on ancient manuscripts. I had used NYPL collections in the past — I traveled from Europe to New York to look at manuscript collections at the library — and I was always fascinated by how a public library collects rare materials like manuscripts and archives. I wanted to know more about these Middle Eastern, North African and South Asian collections. Many years later, I got a job at NYU, where I taught art history at the Institute of Fine Arts. After a year, this job was created at NYPL, which is the first-ever position dedicated to Middle Eastern collections. I applied and got the job. This was very meaningful to me because I always questioned the impact of scholarship and academia beyond scholarly circles and how the knowledge produced can move beyond those very elitist circles and serve communities. A job at NYPL is truly about that — how can we make these collections that are housed in research libraries available to everyone? I’m very passionate about my role, our role and our mission. As the curator for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies — and let’s not focus too much on denominations because “Middle Eastern” and “Islamic” can be very restrictive — I oversee collections produced in North Africa, West Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, including Muslim communities and religious minorities across this vast region, as well as diasporas in the U.S. and Europe. So, I oversee this vast collection, which includes manuscripts, archives — where my focus is really on the diasporas here in New York — artworks, artist books, photography and, of course, general collections for books that are published yearly that we also receive through approval plans to serve our community of readers and patrons. R.N.: What was the impetus for the “Niyū Yūrk” exhibition? Why now? H.A.: We couldn’t anticipate this happening, but between “Meet the Cartozians,” the elections and many other things, I feel like the Middle Eastern diasporas are at the center of many of the conversations happening today. I guess it ended up being an intuition that this needed to happen now. It all came from a project that I worked on at the library when I first took on this position in 2022. I was researching materials produced by the MENA diasporas here in New York. This is a strong collecting area in our holdings because, as a public library in New York with a mission to serve our diverse communities, we collect the materials produced by these communities and needed by them since the late 19th century. So we have collected materials all these years, and since I was trying to locate and define them, we thought, “How about we speak about these and bring together a sample in a gallery and talk about what we did, our mission, these treasures that are either in special collections or in general collections, and talk about the legacy, the history and the present of MENA diasporas in New York?” Mahka Eslami, b. 1981, Iranian; Bodega Boys Series; 10 pigment prints; 2023–24. © Mahka Eslami. So it’s not only a topic that I believe all New Yorkers should learn about and engage with, it’s also one that the communities themselves have expressed a real need for — a need to see themselves reflected in major cultural institutions, especially a public one that is accessible to everyone. We also wanted to talk about our mission in collecting these materials and our partnership with immigrant communities. Rosie Nisanyan (R.N.): Community terms like MENA, SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa), and even Middle Eastern are complicated and constantly debated. How do you choose which terms to use in exhibitions and collections, and how are those terms defined? Hiba Abid (H.A.): I myself am a scholar in Middle Eastern studies, I’m an Islamic art historian, so of course, I’m aware of these debates and I know that these are ongoing conversations and there is ultimately no consensus. There are terms like MENA, SWANA — I’ve also heard of WANA (West Asia and North Africa) — but none of them are neutral. I’m obviously aware of the Eurocentric framework that MENA carries. There are always the questions of “Middle of what?” and “Eastern of where?” but it remains a sort of consensus in the academic field and in most cultural institutions. Whereas I know that people on the ground, mostly artists, organizations and activists, reject that term and prefer SWANA because it recenters the region geographically and it challenges these older Orientalist lenses. It’s important to keep in mind that the exhibition is at the New York Public Library and that it’s a public institution. We welcome all sorts of visitors, so I wanted to remain as accessible as possible and use a term that is widely recognized for broad audiences. Upon entering the exhibition, on your left, there is a label that explains MENA and SWANA. It says that we’re using MENA, but we also recognize the use of SWANA. To me, honestly, these are really provisional tools. They help us organize collections and conversations, but none of them are fully representative of lived experiences and heritage. They are very unstable terms, so I just picked the one that has really reached a consensus among most of the communities. I’ve actually received a lot of feedback from visitors with an Armenian background who were very surprised to see Armenians featured in the show; the show really opens with an Armenian figure. To me, it was natural to include Armenians because these classifications and categorizations — which are much more recent and also produced by the West — make things more complicated today. But these communities all share many aspects of their heritage, which made it natural for me to include them. R.N.: Was it difficult to try to be representative of the MENA communities in NYC? Were there more pieces available for some communities than for others? H.A.: Yes, certainly. When you enter the exhibition, on the left there is the introduction to the exhibition, and then on the side there is a sidebar with some background on our collecting practices, the Oriental Division, its history, what we collected and how we are imagining an inclusive future for our collections based on what we’ve done in the past. That text is mostly there to clarify for visitors that this exhibition is not meant to be a comprehensive or a totalizing narrative of MENA immigration to New York. It is very much guided by and determined by collections of NYPL, so it is also an exhibition about NYPL’s collecting history and its Middle Eastern and North African diasporic collections. So a lot is missing, but a lot is there. It’s a very singular collection that I thought was important to showcase in this exhibition. I would say Arabic materials are more represented, but mostly because Arab communities were among the earliest and largest demographic groups from the region to settle in New York. ԱԼԻՍ (ALIS), VOL. XI, NO. 2, OCT-NOV-DEC. 1930 New York: Sivas Reconstruction Union, Inc. But as I was conducting research, I actually found a lot of Armenian gems in our collections — audio recordings, photographs of artists and musicians, business directories, periodicals founded by the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU), which was founded in Cairo, moved to Paris and came here to New York. I was trying to follow the movement of these networks of periodicals, organizations and advocacy groups and how they ultimately chose New York as a center for their advocacy, literary works and cultural life. I found many Armenian materials that are truly gems and benefited from the knowledge of New York-based scholars who helped me understand the historical relevance of some of these works. I wish I had included more from other communities as well, like Kurdish communities. I am Tunisian myself and there is nothing about Tunisians because that’s also the reality of the collections and of these groups and their migration histories. I also tried to address representation thoughtfully through the audio guide and include contemporary Moroccan or Sudanese voices, particularly because Sudanese communities are often misrepresented or marginalized in narratives about either Africa or the Middle East. Similarly, at the reading station in the center, I included works by Armenian writers to bring in diverse voices that might otherwise be less visible in the exhibition. R.N.: I saw a lot of parallels to the themes brought up in the play “Meet the Cartozians.” In the exhibition, there was even a similar court case, but regarding a Syrian Christian. Was race and the definition of “whiteness” a lens through which you developed the exhibition? H.A.: Yes, you’re right. Actually, one of our colleagues, Brian Jones, is married to the Iranian American actress Susan Pourfar, who was in “Meet the Cartozians.” I wouldn’t say race and the definition of whiteness was a central lens in developing the exhibition, but it appears mostly in the first and last sections, “Roads to New York” and “In Our Own Skin.” When Middle Eastern and North African immigrants arrived in the U.S., citizenship was legally restricted to either white persons, as specified in legal texts, or persons of African descent. Middle Easterners — including Armenians, Syrian Christians, Arab Christians and Arab Muslims — were neither of those. They were considered “Turks” or sometimes called “Asians” or “Asiatics.” They didn’t fit any of these categories, so they had to litigate their racial classification in court to prove that they qualified as white. AUGUSTUS F. SHERMAN, 1865–1925; ALGERIAN MAN FROM ELLIS ISLAND PORTRAITS SERIES, 1910; Gelatin silver print. You’re talking about the Costa Najour case from 1909, which was a turning point for Syrian immigrants seeking naturalization, while Muslims continued to face additional legal obstacles. The reason why they were able to litigate their race in court was because of their ties to Christianity and, therefore, their proximity to whiteness, and because they could say they came from the Holy Land, where Jesus was born. But at the same time, they remained foreign and were considered exotic or suspect. So those tensions between being classified as white legally, while still being culturally othered, continue to resonate today. That’s what the last section in the show, “In Our Own Skin,” addresses as well. Today people say, “We are classified as Middle Eastern North African people, but at the same time we are racialized in our daily experience and daily lives,” so they like to call themselves “the most invisible visible group.” There are certainly a lot of shared concerns with “Meet the Cartozians,” which is literally about whiteness, the tension of belonging and the painful path to becoming white and then somehow becoming American and what that entails. I think “Meet the Cartozians” approaches that on a very personal level. R.N.: There is an event coming up on March 6 that’s part of the exhibition, called “The Sultan of New York: Uncovering New York’s Early Armenian Presence.” What can attendees expect from that discussion? H.A.: Among the people I discussed with and had the opportunity to learn from were Thomas Simsarian Dolan and Nora Lessersohn, two scholars who work on Armenian history in New York City. They also do a lot of other work to raise awareness and knowledge of Armenian history, heritage and presence here. I spoke with them often, and of course I read the scholarship and essays by Nora Lessersohn on Khachik Oscanyan. Before we even started thinking about the show, I learned about her research on Khachik Oscanyan (or Khachadur Christopher Oscanyan). She mentioned that the New York Public Library had special materials that Oscanyan either published or projects he was involved in. His book, “The Sultan and His People,” is the opening piece of the exhibition, which Oscanyan had offered to the Astor Library even before the New York Public Library was inaugurated. I was really fascinated by Khachik Oscanyan as an Armenian man from Istanbul (Constantinople) who came here and who was aware in the 19th century of misconceptions about the Middle East — in this specific case, about the Ottoman Empire — and who used a variety of media strategies to educate American audiences about the Middle East and its diversity of culture, languages, ethnicities and faiths. So this is what the talk on March 6 is going to be about, starting with a conversation on Khachik Oscanyan and his initiatives in the mid-19th century, much earlier than the first wave of immigration from the Middle East. It will also explore how New York became a center of Armenian American life, with vibrant printing presses, record labels, restaurants and community associations like the AGBU that I mentioned earlier. Starting from Oscanyan, the conversation between Thomas and Nora will then move toward more contemporary efforts of the Armenian community here to advocate for culture, the cause and to educate people about the complexity of Armenian identity. As we mentioned, there are still many misconceptions. People don’t always understand that Armenians also came from the Middle East and share a common heritage with people from the region. Unfortunately, the event on March 6 is sold out, but much more is coming soon. R.N.: Where can our readers go if they’re looking for more information or are interested in seeing more Armenian materials? H.A.: People should check the library’s website and reach out if they have any questions or research inquiries. Some interesting materials in our collections include “Armenians on 8th Ave [sound recording],” “American-Armenian encyclopaedic almanac, 1924,” “The Armenian Reporter [periodical],” “Arshag Fetvadjian: an Armenian painter and archaeologist,” and “The Cry of Armenia.” “Niyū Yūrk: Middle Eastern and North African Lives in the City” is open through March 8 at the Celeste Gottesman Bartos and Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos Exhibitions Gallery in the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. You can access the audio guide and see highlights of the exhibition on the NYPL website. All images courtesy of The New York Public Library.