EXHIBITION | Asilah Oui: Robert Blackburn in Morocco

'Asilah Oui: Robert Blackburn in Morocco' is an exhibition at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts' Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, showing prints exchanged by the artists, photographs, and ephemera from the early years of the Asilah Cultural Moussem's Engraver's Atelier. The Moussem was an annual international arts festival founded in 1978 in Asilah by artist Mohamed Melehi and diplomat Mohamed Benaïssa, rooted in the Casablanca School and centered on Moroccan heritage, local materials, and communal labor. Melehi invited Robert Blackburn to establish the Engraver's Atelier, bringing the cooperative model of his New York workshop to Asilah, with Sudanese master printmaker Mohammad Omer Khalil directing it from 1979 to 2018. Curated by Imani Congdon with the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop and titled after one of Blackburn's woodcuts, the exhibition celebrates the friendships and access to printmaking that developed there, showing collective culture as an act of civic recovery and democratic participation.