When Art Became Serious in Saudi Arabia

Art was never taken seriously when we were small. In school it was “fun time,” a break from the serious subjects, and nobody worried about grades. But in my last years, when things in Saudi Arabia were just beginning to shift, we had a Saudi teacher who had studied art in the UK. Instead of admiration, she was met with disbelief. Why waste years abroad on such a frivolous pursuit? At the time, art was still linked in many minds to bored housewives rather than serious careers.

Today, the picture could not be more different. Galleries in Riyadh and Jeddah are serious business, biennales draw international curators, and Saudi artists feature on global stages from Venice to New York. What was once marginal has become central to Saudi Arabia’s cultural economy.

That shift came to mind recently when I stumbled across a book in a Dubai bookstore Art in Saudi Arabia: A New Creative Economy by Rebecca Anne Proctor  and Alia Al-Senussi, was published in March 2024. Its timing was apt. For those who grew up in the Kingdom, it captures a transformation lived in real time: art moving from the private salon into the public sphere. Although published 18 months ago, its arguments remain strikingly relevant.

A decade ago, Edge of Arabia was one of the few initiatives connecting Saudi art to wider audiences. Founded in 2003 by the British artist Stephen Stapleton and two Saudis, Abdulnasser Gharem and Ahmed Mater, it began as a grassroots collective in Abha before evolving into an international platform. Its exhibitions in London, Berlin, and New York introduced contemporary Saudi art to foreign audiences at a time when few in the Kingdom even saw it themselves. Stapleton once said their aim was “to create a space for dialogue when no such space existed.” That modest ambition helped shift art from private living rooms to something with institutional weight.

The new visibility has produced figures who embody this change. Abdulnasser Gharem, once a lieutenant-colonel in the Saudi army, built an international profile while navigating delicate boundaries at home. “Art was the only safe place left to ask questions,” he reflected in one interview. His conceptual works — from rubber stamps critiquing bureaucracy to monumental installations like Message/Messenger — were never just about aesthetics but about probing the structures of Saudi life.

Others represent a younger generation. Muhannad Shono, whose thread-and-ink works appeared at the Venice Biennale, has described his installations as a way of “making visible the invisible lines that shape us.” Manal AlDowayan, one of the most internationally recognised Saudi artists, has explored memory, absence, and women’s voices. Her installation Suspended Together — a flock of doves stamped with Saudi women’s travel documents — was both poetic and political. “My art,” she has said, “is about giving women a space to speak when silence was expected.”

The book frames this as the rise of a “creative economy.” That is accurate. Yet for many Saudis, it is also about identity, belonging, and new arenas for conversation. Attendance figures back this up: the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale drew more than 100,000 visitors in its inaugural edition, a scale unthinkable a generation ago. Young Saudis now treat galleries as places to test questions of society, tradition, and individuality. As one student visitor put it recently, “It’s the first time I’ve seen art that feels like it’s about me, not just decoration.”

Risks remain. When art doubles as diplomacy, it can be polished for international audiences in ways that dilute sharper voices. The Saudi pavilion at Venice, for example, has been praised for professionalism but sometimes criticised for being “too safe” compared with what younger artists are producing in underground shows in Jeddah and Khobar. A curator who worked on one recent Riyadh exhibition admitted privately that “we are always negotiating what can be shown, and what cannot.”

For readers outside Saudi Arabia, Art in Saudi Arabia: A New Creative Economy? offers an accessible guide to a transformation that is as social as it is cultural. For Saudis, the shift feels more intimate. It is visible in the surge of art programmes in schools, in scholarships for artists abroad, and in the steady professionalisation of what was once a hobby. Whether in a Riyadh gallery, a Jeddah warehouse, or the Saudi pavilion in Venice, the brushstrokes and installations speak to a society discovering new ways to see itself — and to be seen.

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