Arie Amaya-Akkermans is a writer, art critic and independent researcher based in Italy. His work focuses on the history of archaeology, contemporary art and the politics of memory in the Middle East.
At the Michigan State University Broad Art Museum in East Lansing, the exhibition "Echoes of War" presents the lifework of an artist who received only fragmented attention in life. Despite a prolific output and a rich exhibition history, the Lebanese-American painter Nabil Kanso has remained a marginal figure in contemporary art discourse—until now. After decades of pieces depicting the horrors of war, suffering and autocracy in the Middle East, Kanso's art is finally coming to life.
This retrospective offers the most comprehensive survey to date of a career shaped by exile, artistic conviction and an unflinching confrontation with modern warfare in the Middle East.
To be sure, Kanso's work had been widely exhibited, especially in the Americas throughout the 1970s and 1990s. Most notably, the artist produced a series of 80 mural paintings composed between 1974 and 1994. This cycle includes "The Split of Life," a project of artistic activism dealing with the violent history of modern conflicts and "The Journey of Art for Peace," an initiative that culminated in a monograph distributed to world leaders—including Pope John Paul II, French President Jacques Chirac and Israeli President Ezer Weizman. The volume featured, among other works, "Blazing Vortices: Lebanon Summer of 1982" and "Sabra and Shatila," a harrowing response to the massacres carried out during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Yet most of Kanso's vast oeuvre, going back to the 1960s, remained unexhibited. By the time of his death in 2019, decades of paintings and drawings languished unexhibited in his Atlanta studio. Between the 1990s and the 2020s, his work was not held in any solo exhibitions. It was not until 2024 that a significant reemergence occurred in New York at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Art.
The exhibition, titled "Endless Night," showcased previously unseen works, including the ink drawing series "Leaves from the Theater of War" (1980-1992), a visceral record of the artist's personal recollections of war. For Kanso, who began his career in New York in the 1960s after studying at New York University, this was a belated homecoming.
Forced to leave Lebanon following the 1958 crisis, Kanso was again displaced by the outbreak of civil war in 1975. He was permanently displaced when his family's property was expropriated during the controversial postwar redevelopment of Beirut's historic center by the joint stock company Solidere. His displacement profoundly shaped both the artist's political vision and his marginalization.
In the United States, Kanso's figurative expressionist style—informed by the aesthetic legacies of Goya, the European Romantic movement and Dada—stood apart from the period's dominant schools of abstraction and minimalism. In Lebanon, his diaspora status and early departure excluded him from the postwar emergence of conceptually driven art connected to the conflict. While local contemporaries like Chafic Abboud, Yvette Achkar, Abdel Hamid Baalbaki or Laure Ghorayeb addressed the civil war through diverse idioms, Kanso's diasporic distance and stylistic commitments minimized his work outside the canon.
As a peace activist, Kanso resisted his work's commercialization, and often seemed uninterested in the careerist machinations of the art world.
- Arie Amaya-Akkermans
But his politics may have constituted the primary reason for his estrangement. As a peace activist, Kanso resisted his work's commercialization, and often seemed uninterested in the careerist machinations of the art world.
"Echoes of War" allows viewers to finally grapple with the full force of these convictions. Among its most poignant pieces is "Escape/Fleeing," a relatively small painting by Kanso's standards, drawn from a previously unexhibited series. Alongside it is the "Ladders/Syria under Siege" series (2011-2016), one of his last major bodies of work. These paintings reflect the ravages of the Syrian Civil War, which Kanso became aware of from a distance. He centralizes themes such as the unbearable burden of confinement and siege, mass displacement and the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime—with some human rights organizations identifying nearly 85 chemical attacks by the Assad regime between 2013 and 2018—throughout the piece.
Ladders and grids recur across these works, offering ambiguous metaphors: a way out, a path down or a purgatorial stasis. Ascension and descent blur within Kanso's visual cosmology—each step a potential escape or a plunge into the abyss. Such imagery was central to his practice going back to the 1980s, when he painted nearly 200 works inspired by the apocalyptic visions of the Book of Revelation, the Revelation of St. John and the Book of Daniel amid Israel's invasion of Lebanon.
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That these paintings re-emerge now—after the December 2024 fall of Assad's regime and amid Syria's turbulent transition—is significant. It creates space for public reflection on the atrocities that took place, not only through years of war but across a longue durée of authoritarianism, repression and imperial complicity across the Middle East and the broader world. These histories, intertwined with Syria, played a crucial role in the disintegration of the Lebanese state and the region's broader descent into instability.
One of the most haunting works from this late period, "Aleppo Under Siege," remains unexhibited. Depicting the city's devastating four-year battle (2012–2016), in which over 30,000 civilians perished, the painting fuses human forms, rubble and brushstrokes into a chaotic continuum. It is less a scene than a convulsion. But such scenes were never bound to one geography. From the genocide in Bosnia to the Holocaust; from the Vietnam War to armed conflict in El Salvador and Nicaragua; from the Lebanese Civil War to the Gulf War: His art is not the story of a single war, but a reckoning with modern violence itself.
Throughout his life, Kanso remained committed to rendering the invisible as visible. He was not content to simply document events. His practice interrogated the metaphysical dimensions of violence—what it means to endure it, to witness it and to survive its memory. In the 1990s, he painted "America: 500 Years," a series chronicling centuries of genocide, slavery and the racial legacies of empire. Later works addressed the torture at Abu Ghraib and the U.S. incarceration crisis, including its deeply racialized legal system. In these paintings, American prison cells echo the trapped spaces of Syrian sieges. The ladders that once offered escape become structural metaphors for carceral and capitalist systems whose violence reverberates globally.
Executed by Kanso in the last years of his life while enduring many financial limitations, these smaller-scale works embody the same moral intensity as his monumental murals. They demand that we confront the connective tissue between seemingly distant struggles—the war-torn and the imprisoned; the occupied and the forgotten.
In this moment of profound inequality and numbing violence, Kanso's art reawakens our sense of historical continuity. It reminds us that none of these catastrophes are isolated. "Echoes of War" is not just a retrospective—it is a call to remember.
