An ode to Safeya Binzagr

While living in Cairo with her family, Safeya Binzagr would wait in anticipation for her older sister Soraya’s visits. She always brought with her many stories of their beloved hometown Jeddah, a city Safeya longed for but only knew as a child. Soraya’s stories about its people, traditions, buildings, and trees were the only way Safeya knew how Jeddah looked and felt. They fuelled a curiosity in Safeya’s heart, so intense it made her a pioneering artist dedicated to document everyday life in Jeddah and the rest of Saudi Arabia – with Saudi women in front and centre.  

Born in Jeddah in 1940 to renowned merchants, Safeya moved at the age of 7 with her siblings, mother, and grandmother to Cairo for school. Many scholars speculate that the lack of schools for girls was the reason behind this move. This wasn’t entirely the case – girls (and boys) were sent to local Islamic teachers’ houses for an education. It was also common among upper-class families to send their kids abroad for education, especially in Egypt. Abdul Quddus al-Ansari (b. 1908), a novelist and historian from Jeddah, relates this to a combination of lack of an established educational system and an attempt since the late 19th century by families in Jeddah, and the Hijaz region at large, to resist the Ottoman mode of teaching that decentered Arabic and its heritage. 

Safeya grew up very aware of her material condition growing up, and how it enabled her to pursue several passions. She immersed herself and fell in love with art galleries, museums, and theatres all over Cairo. But she was specifically aware of her family’s support, especially Soraya’s and her older brother, Waheeb’s. In an interview with art historian Dr. Eiman Elgibreen, she said: “It was a blessing that we had an open minded family […] they gave their boys and girls equal opportunities.” Regardless of law and traditions, the tribe, family, relatives, or any other familial structure in Saudi Arabia is mainly what dictates what one can and can’t do. When they change, society follows. That’s what Safeya said to art educator Dr. Maha Alkhudair: “Changes come from inside the small community, which is the family.”

Sixteen years after her departure, Safeya returned to Jeddah in 1963 for the first time. She spent her days writing articles and publishing her drawings in one of Saudi’s first newspapers, Albilad. However, she couldn’t help but feel disappointed after her return. The city (and its traditions) that her sister told her about were no longer there. Everything was radically changing, embracing an imported modernity after the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia, leaving many in an existential crisis of where they stood culturally. That’s when her instinct of cultural preservation kicked in. She knew she could use her art to create images of her city and country and fulfill the nostalgia she’s always felt since she was a child. After over a year and half of her return to Jeddah, Safeya went back to Cairo to take professional art classes to pursue this dream. This is where she met her dear friend Mounirah Mosly (b. 1952). 

Creating a reservoir of images of and in Saudi was almost an impossible task. Idolatry is strictly prohibited in Islam, and it is a common belief that creating images of humans (and other sentient beings) falls under that. How could Safeya preserve something she never saw, or even have access to visual references that could help her? She had to start from scratch and challenge accepted norms and boundaries. She relied mainly on Soraya’s stories, oral history, and months of being involved with Saudi communities beyond Jeddah’s. Another layer of difficulty was painting Saudi women. Safeya had to become less realistic in her paintings to navigate these religious and social restrictions. Except for her renowned painting Zabun (1969), women in her early published work were veiled. Safeya even had to consult her sister Inja and brother-in-law before exhibiting Zabun because it was inspired by Inja’s features. 

Having developed a personal style that both documents  historical subjects and pre-oil everyday life Jeddah and Saudi and (loosely) abides by common social and religious beliefs, Safeya and Mounirah Mously became the first Saudi women to have a public exhibition of their work in 1968. Since there were no art galleries in Jeddah, they decided to show their work at spaces they strongly supported, so they chose a girls’ school: دار اﻟﺘﺮﺑﯿﺔ اﻟﺤﺪﯾﺜﺔ (Dar Al-Tarbieah Al-Hadeethah). The exhibition was incredibly successful, attracting fellow artists, journalists, and diplomats. It also launched Safeya’s career. In آخر قطعة من العجين, she said that the day of the exhibition was when she actually became an artist. She believed that the audience, who she was trying to gift and share this nostalgia with, was what helped her art to be recognised and celebrated in the first place. Two years later, Safeya was the first Saudi woman to have a solo exhibition, this time at دار اﻟﺤﻨﺎن (Dar Al-Hanan), another leading girls’ school in Jeddah. 

Firsts are common in Safeya’s legacy. Besides being one of the first Saudi exhibited artists around the world, she established the first art museum in the country in 2000 – Darat Safeya Binzagr, an arts hub and education initiative that first started as an art gallery for her work. Her love for her city and country’s cultures created counter-images that transcended universally-held misconceptions of Saudi Artists, mainly relying on images of its “inhospitable” deserts and oil wealth. Sadly, she couldn’t attend any of her exhibition and museum openings in Saudi – she was “spiritually there, mainly in a backroom or a rooftop looking down at the audience”. Yet, she surprisingly never embraced feminism. She believed in (Saudi) women’s rights and experienced firsthand what it meant to overcome barriers, but Western feminism as she knew it then forced her to live and believe in one liberatory way of life, one that wasn’t empathetic and didn’t align with the nuanced lives she and other Saudi women lived. Safeya believed that her dedication to her craft was the primary catalyst in her journey, and not these foreign ideals. To some extent, this is accurate in the early days of the visual arts movement in Saudi. Dr. Elgibreen emphasises two examples. Artist Fawzia Abdullateef (b. 1947) comes from a similar background, but her work didn’t gain the same popularity. In another case, artist Abdulhalim Radwi (b. 1939), who had the first registered art exhibition in Saudi in 1965, opened his museum shortly after Safeya, but closed shortly after his death in 2006. Besides these local examples, Safeya recalls in multiple interviews French women artists telling her in the 1980s they had to change their names in their exhibition flyers and invitations to be more credible and taken seriously – something she couldn’t relate to in the 1960s in Saudi Arabia. 

How did you make an entire visual memory from scratch? How did you capture unseen sights and corners no lens or camera could reach? How could your brush stroke have this much power? Safeya was a visionary and a pioneer. She didn’t take any of her answers, and thereby responsibilities, to these questions lightly. She had a trained hand and eye, a resourceful and supportive family, and a city saturated with memories. And she knew how to use them to claim a place for her art and self, even at the harm and cost that comes with being the first. Safeya Binzager passed away in September, 2024 in Jeddah.