Research Communications

Sitting on a hot August day under the shade of a pecan tree in her Lubbock, Texas, backyard, artist Lahib Jaddo observes that along the Earth’s plane of 33.5 degrees North latitude, two remarkably similar environments exist halfway across the globe from one another. Her birthplace in Baghdad, Iraq, and her longtime home in West Texas both share a landscape that is hot, flat, dry and dusty. Upon first visiting West Texas in 1983, Jaddo decided to stay as she was caught out in an impressive dust storm that turned skies to red and brown, like the sandstorms that peek across the horizon in her home country. A woman between two cultures, Jaddo, now a United States citizen, creates paintings that are marked by a rich cultural heritage and her own family history. Through her journey, she has found herself.

Photos by
Kippra D. Hopper

In her paintings, Jaddo considers the conflicts and parallels between her Middle Eastern childhood and her American adulthood. She contemplates themes of ethnic identity, sense of place, contemporary life, sexuality, emotions, alternate realities and nature. The depictions surface in a combination of human figures, landscapes, textures, shapes, costumes, movement and narrative. Jaddo paints about the turmoil that she has experienced because her homeland is at war with her new country, about the hardships of motherhood, the emotional upheaval of divorce, the Citadel of her homeland, her lost language and life around her.

“When I arrived in West Texas, it was as if I had arrived home again. The physical terrain reminded me of home — flat spaces, dust storms, and dryness. In Baghdad when the dust would blow, we would fly kites in the wind. I thought I had come home. The cultural terrain was different in Lubbock, yet, this is the space where I have opportunities to ask questions like who am I, where do I belong, and other questions that I was not able to ask back home in Iraq. Now I am an outsider in Iraq, a foreigner,” Jaddo says. “Both homes have limits and boundaries. I often am asked which home I prefer. As I paint from old photos and memories, it occurs to me, I don’t know my homeland anymore. I hear stories from relatives about the multiple wars, how so much has changed, how so many people have died, and I think of the parts of myself that are no longer alive.”

A hybrid living a multicultural life, Jaddo creates stories and alternate realities in her home, her life and her paintings. She explores her multiple identities as insider/outsider, mother/child, citizen/alien and lover/loner. In many of her paintings, Jaddo substitutes the Caprock of West Texas for the hills of Mesopotamia. She uses text from the Koran in her art, something forbidden in her home country. She trades ancient taboos for contemporary ones. The artist uses her paintings as a contemplative playground where she experiences, worries, projects and documents. Her paintings become journal entries.

In some of her work, Jaddo paints individual women suspended in mid-air, without gravity, place or grounding. The backgrounds depict textured spaces, but often lack landmarks. In some of the images, Jaddo’s female figures, dressed in brightly colored clothing that covers the body without exposing its features, hold on to a floating Persian rug, a solitary woman with a small grasp of something solid, a flying carpet. The women’s clothing is always revealing of intricate patterns, embellished with lace and sequins. The women often look alike, as Jaddo uses her daughter, Nadia, as a model to suggest that her figures convey women’s universal experiences. Her work portrays every woman’s story of inhabiting two cultures. Expressions on their faces and their poses reveal emotion in context of surroundings, culture and voice. “I have painted the schizophrenia of being a good woman but wanting freedom, of being a mother and homemaker but wanting a profession, of being docile as a Muslim woman from the Middle East but craving unlimited freedoms.”

Photos by
Kippra D. Hopper

Jaddo relates visually to the world around her, and she paints to understand her inner worlds. She seeks to memorialize a specific moment in time by depicting it with beauty. Painting, she says, takes her on a journey of emotions, the colors and shapes revealing the ebb and flow of her passions. “When I was a little girl, all around us was ancient architecture, intricate rugs under our feet, colors and patterns surrounding us in different aspects of life’s visuals. Growing up with that influenced my outlook.”

When Jaddo first was trying to find her voice in art making, she found no women artists as role models. She studied about Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo, but she found herself alone without role models of women artists in her culture. Jaddo was drawn to old European masters because they painted in the style of realism. “I try to tell my story of a woman who came from a binding culture. I am trying to find liberalism in the world that does not allow it. My work is about freedom – whether of thought, lifestyle, sexuality, pathways, or expressions,” she comments. “I have lived half my life in the Old World, the Middle East, and half of it in this New World. My work is a reflection of that mix of both worlds. This reality is both a constant tension and an infinite well of emotion that pushes me to want to know the meanings of things. In this complex arena, I weave traditional, realistic figurative painting with contemporary iconography to express freedom, beauty, and simply to tell my story.”

Born in Baghdad in 1955, Jaddo says her cultural roots rise from a place in northern Iraq called Kirkuk, the city of her mother’s family. Jaddo left the land of her birth when she was 10 years old, her family forced out by the threats to her father and other intellectuals under Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime. As an intellectual and a liberal, her father was one of the first engineers and among the first highly educated individuals in Iraq and was targeted by the Hussein regime as being a socialist and communist. The family moved to Beirut, Lebanon, another locale besieged by revolts and war, where Jaddo spent her teen years. In 1977, she moved to the United States as a newlywed and continued her education.

The artist had the opportunity in 2005 and 2006 to return to Iraq as a part of an educational exchange program between United States universities and institutions in northern Iraq. As an Associate Professor of Architecture at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Jaddo visited Salahadin University in Erbil, the Foundation Technology Institute in Kirkuk, the College of Engineering in Erbil, and the Institute of Applied Arts in Baghdad. When she returned she sought to document what she had observed in her native country and to explore visually the lost cultures of her ancestors and the war-torn state of her homeland.

The visit to Iraq evoked mystery for Jaddo as she wondered what she would see and how she would react, how she should dress, who she still would know there and whether she would feel like a foreigner. Her culture welcomed her work and her efforts in being a part of the creators of the first Turkumani University in North Iraq. Jaddo yearned to return to Iraq to view what was left of her family, heritage and home where her own art is foreign. She longed to see the remnants of places that in her mind still live and loom larger than life: the Citadel in Kirkuk; Tel-Afar, her father’s hometown; the hills of Mesopotamia; and the ziggurat of Samara. “My memories of my mother’s hometown of Kirkuk are vivid. I remember climbing the Citadel, walking alleys, reaching courtyard houses to visit my aunt in her ancestral home. I remember running up to the flat roof where they slept in the summer to see the city roof tops red with poppies from the spring rains. I remember my aunt slapping a huge circle of dough on the sides of her mud oven to make brown bread to feed us while chickens ran at her feet.”

Interweaving architecture in her art, Jaddo makes wood and stone into cultural signifiers, suggesting history, politics and personal identity. She uses the expressions of art, language and architecture to reclaim, recreate and reassert her own bicultural identity. Jaddo often uses text in her paintings to add another layer of communication and to transport a viewer to another part of the world. In her many readings, Jaddo has discovered a 13th century Turkish poet Jalal Ud Deen Rumi, who wrote about being one with nature and finding satisfaction in life on Earth by considering oneself as part of the creatures upon it. This philosophy, Jaddo says, became her religion. When she came to Lubbock, she was determined to take in nature despite living in a city. “I wanted to watch the sunset. I was determined to get in touch with nature every day. I find new places to explore and hike. I read and I use poetry to help me to tell my stories.”

For example, in her paintings of the Citadel, the most prominent architectural feature in Kirkuk, the artist conveys a political message about rebuilding of the city; at the same time, she reflects on her mixed Turkumani and Armenian ancestry. Jaddo has lived among horse-drawn carriages, courtyard houses, mound cities on hills, and Turkmen people of northern Iraq. The Citadel, razed by Hussein in 1998, had been the focus of Turkmen social life, an expression of Turkmen culture and identity. In one of her most recent bodies of work, Jaddo uses Turkmen and the Citadel to assert, “We are ancient. We have been here a long time. We rise up from the earth. We are strong. We will last.”

Jaddo explains that architectural elements create settings or the grounding for characters in her paintings; the environment is central to what she wishes to communicate. “Architecture says ‘I belong to this place. It’s in my heart.’ Architecture in my art can be a stage for the story I want to tell, a character in the story, or integral to the narrative itself. In my paintings, architecture speaks, transports or signifies. The human figure may make no sense isolated from the cityscape. But when the human form is juxtaposed on the cityscape, the dialogue between foreground and background create the story.”

The absence of architecture also is significant, as in the works of women flying through space on Persian rugs. “During times of my life that I felt depleted, I removed all land and architecture from the background of paintings, expressing and exaggerating the sense of exile or lack of belonging,” she explains. Despite feeling out of place and as an outsider no matter where she visits, Jaddo has been able to fit in to West Texas by befriending the outsider community. “All of my friends around me now are those people who are from the outside and not belonging to the mainstream society, people on the edges of society. Together, we make a nice big unit. We become family, and I feel I am home. People on the edges of society usually allow others a lot of freedom, because they have suffered a lot of the same problems. So, anything you say goes, anyway you want to live your life goes. You can live with total freedom with no boundaries to stifle creativity. The people and the place have given me a life in West Texas.”

Jaddo, a feminist, is a socially conscious artist. Her works are social commentaries about bridges between cultures and in her images of the links between interior/exterior, past/present, man/woman, she begins to dissolve dichotomies and the idea of bridging cultures is taken a step further. Her empowering images of Islamic womanhood shown in traditional garb are surrounded by studies of architecture, mysticism, nature and culture. The birds and butterflies that fill some of her works are colorful and bright reminders of optimism even in the face of loss. In some of her works set in beautiful landscapes of warmly colored canyons, deserts and huge, open skies.

Jaddo reveals a woman’s open chest out of which butterflies or poppies fly into the atmosphere. Through another series of works, Jaddo depicts women in landscapes with water, symbolizing female sexuality. In one painting, titled “Ankle Deep” from the “In Water” series, a woman stands in water up to her ankles, with Lebanon in the background. The female figure wears a white dress, as a symbol of purity, and she is lifting the dress to expose herself. Jaddo explains, “I’m exposing myself. The painting is about sexuality and it says I am a sexual person and I choose to participate and there’s nothing wrong with that. The similarity of sexuality and nature is the blissful feelings of both.”

A strong indication that Jaddo’s heart now belongs in West Texas is her “Blue Butterflies” that depicts a woman opening her chest to reveal a landscape painted inside her heart of the woman – the Caprock canyon lands of West Texas and the same landscape depicted behind and around the woman. Exploring the land of West Texas has kept Jaddo in the area. Lubbock is within an hour’s drive of the canyons of the Caprock, Post and Palo Duro and is accessible to the mountains and red rocks of New Mexico. In these environments Jaddo finds inspiration, “When you have a chance to get lost on small roads, you go places unexpected and you find precious places to view the landscape and to hike. I like to wander, to go on a mystery path for a while.” Her paintings convey this sense of serendipity in process.

Jaddo’s stucco home and studio in Lubbock are painted with colors similar to those of her home in Iraq; for example, she uses vibrant blue to ward off the evil eye. In her home as in her art Jaddo uses color to merge her cultural identities. Jaddo’s friends call her home, “Jaddoland,” because the place so reflects the artist in its earth tones on walls inside and out with its sense of strong light. The many windows look outside to the backyard where a tall blue gate is surrounded by a fence where Jaddo has painted suns, moons and dragonflies. From the front entrance, visitors first are greeted with a xeriscaped yard, full prickly pear, sage, and a bird of paradise bush. She welcomes us with a warm smile and a comforting spirit, as she offers a hot cup of tea and some sweets from the Middle East. She tells us of her journeys and then we see the pages of that history in her works so embracing of the self.

Behind unveiled eyes, Jaddo has walked on mountains of sand in her native Middle East, and in West Texas she discovers cool, shady canyons of inverted mountains. Traversing a path of freedom, through her art Jaddo remembers and re-envisions herself, the landscapes of her past and present and the poppies that lined the roofs in the Iraq of her youth. Lahib Jaddo’s power as an artist emerges from her difficult and joyous journeys, from holding onto herself and from the process of survival. In tune with self and others, nature, experience, emotions, spirituality and relationships, Jaddo has found her voice in her art and we are enlightened by the colorful and soulful sounds.