Old Persian Calligraphy Survives in All Its Elegance, in an Unlikely Place

S ometimes opportunity knocks in booms and bangs. I told a good friend a week ago that I was heading to North Adams, Mass., a short drive from my home, to see the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, or MASS MoCA, the biggest contemporary art museum in the world. “You ought to try to meet Alibaba Awrang,” my friend said. “He’s there as an artist in residence, and he’s a fantastic painter . . . calligraphy, Persian-style . . . and he’s an Afghan.” I’d been thinking about an artist profile, which I haven’t done in a few months, and I’d profiled neither an artist inspired by calligraphy nor an artist from Afghanistan.

Striking while the iron’s hot is very good, too. It was a Sunday, so I didn’t expect to find him, but find him, I did. I can be a bloodhound. And tempus fugit, and fast. No thousand and one nights for him in gritty North Adams, not even a thousand and one minutes, since Alibaba (b. 1972) was leaving the Berkshires the next day. Serendipity is a lovely thing. So, “open sesame”  — your eyes and minds, that is, to something different.

I was able to spend part of my MoCA visit at his studio at the museum, looking at his work, talking about his art and education, and hearing about his and his family’s trek from Kabul in August 2021 to New Milford in rural Connecticut. Alibaba and his wife, with four children in tow, were evacuated by the State Department as the Taliban approached Kabul.

Alibaba was working on a large picture, about 40 by 32 inches, not titled yet. It’s six rows of lines that bend and curve in waves and in multiple colors — black, gold, Brazil brown, red madder, teal, yellow, and different greens. The lines can look chaotic at first, but after a few seconds, it’s obvious they’re not. They’re both sweeping and staccato, a look that’s uninhibited and disciplined at the same time, in equipoise. This isn’t automatic writing. This isn’t Cy Twombly–style quick, coarse, and primitive. I knew it came from an ancient tradition. There’s no explicit message, though Alibaba’s marks are based on Persian calligraphy. That’s the art of beautiful writing and used for official documents, the Koran, poetry, and all else that’s important.

As we talked about his technique, or process, Alibaba said he works with collage in mind. This surprised me, since collage in European and American art is a combination of media — paint sometimes but often paper, textiles, cutouts, photographs, and three-dimensional everyday objects. To Alibaba, layering is key. He thinks of collage as layers of black ink that he applies first and then layers of acrylic in whatever colors happen to inspire him, and then gold or silver leaf. Cyan, turquoise, or sky blue — the colors of the sky — are the last to be applied. That’s the color of tranquility, peace, wisdom, and clarity.

Persian calligraphy is on the same page, so to speak, as the trecento artists of Italy in the 1300s, in that gold leaf, in the Persian tradition, proclaims wealth and, by extension, power and luxury but also transcendence. With only gold backgrounds, with no landscapes or cityscapes, Italian and French divinities seem of our world but also very much of another. And gold and silver leaf glow and glitter, adding octane. Applying pigment, layer after layer, using sharpened bamboo, the artist has to be disciplined. There’s a ritual to it that’s spiritual. The artist gets absorbed in it. So do we.

Alibaba grew up on a farm in a rural part of Ghazni Province in southeastern Afghanistan, not far from the border of Pakistan. Until the 680s, it was a center of Buddhism but was Islamized, often brutally. The Ghaznavids later brought Islam to northern India. Ghazni, the province’s capital, is ancient but has been razed or assaulted often, and as recently as 1839, when the British captured it. After a village education low on arts, the talented, precocious Alibaba studied at the Iranian Calligraphers Association (ICA) in Shiraz and then in Tehran, getting a B.A. and an M.A. The Taliban closed Afghanistan’s universities, and the 1980s, Russian occupation, and war weren’t ideal for study. Regardless, the ICA is among the world’s best places to study traditional calligraphy like Nasta’liq, developed in 14th-century Persia. Its letters are elongated and sloping, refined and languid with the energy of a babbling brook, not a cascade. They look elastic and elegant.

In ye olden days, art historians needed a good reading knowledge of German to get a Ph.D. since so much art history scholarship on Greek and Roman art, the Italian Renaissance, and medieval European art was in German. That meant we needed to read Gothic script, too, which is fixed, architectural, often heavy, and ornate. Persian calligraphy flows. It’s intricate and nicely balanced between vertical and horizontal elements. Think arabesques and slender minarets, too. Calligraphy is, of course, writing the alphabet, in this case Persian. In the picture in Alibaba’s studio, he started with the first letter of the Persian alphabet, alef, the alphabet’s vowel king. He goes from there. Today, and the way Alibaba uses it, it’s an element of design and also spiritual, not dogmatic but, as Whistler would call it, art for art’s sake. Whistler was a fan of calligraphy, too.

A series of works, all from 2025, show that not all of Alibaba’s paintings are as abstract as the picture in his studio at MoCA. Fall has an autumnal palette and could be a suggestion of seasonal sunlight, or it could be a gold circle serving as a central focus surrounded by elements with so much velocity that they’d make a dervish dizzy. Gold Goal is all gold leaf. My World is pure elegance. They’re all mystical. Univers first suggested to me an abstract, ancient mosaic, a bit worse for wear; each square is part of the whole but also its own autonomous scene. In Islamic design, the circle could mean unity or infinity or perfection. Alibaba works in different scales, from a 12-by-20-foot triptych commissioned by the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha to a 20-by-26-inch piece. When Alibaba left Kabul, he was considered one of Afghanistan’s best artists. He landed on his feet, but, basically, he’s rebuilding his career.

Each work experiments with color, form, balance, and harmony and invites reflection and meditation. I asked him whether he has a more or less realized look or concept in mind when he starts a painting. No, he said, he doesn’t. Far from it. He might start with a letter from the Islamic alphabet or a shape like a circle, but then color and shape take him on an uncharted journey, so he usually surprises himself. To reach a place of beauty or sublimity, a soulful place, an artist has to have that kind of approach. Artists who start with dogma finish with an illustration or art in a straitjacket.

Before he left Afghanistan, Alibaba worked as an artist in residence at Turquoise Mountain, a nonprofit and arts colony founded in 2006 by Prince Charles, now King Charles III, to support artists and craft communities protecting and revitalizing heritage in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, and what it calls the Levant — what’s now Israel, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon.

Alibaba’s paintings are very beautiful and a salve for me after what I last saw at MoCA: a 20-foot charcoal drawing of Ku Klux Klansmen, a video about waterboarding, and a craft show that, MASS MoCA tells us, is meant to evoke the warmth of collectivism. I kid you not. I wonder if Pol Pot crocheted in his spare time between homicidal diktats. In a world so prone, as ours has always been, to brutality, Alibaba’s art beguiles and soothes.

In the era of my childhood, nearly all American grade schools taught penmanship, not so much as the art of beautiful writing but as respect for heritage, and as a discipline, a means to communicate, and a reminder that handwritten thank-you notes are essential, so much so that chronic failure to write them was grounds for an exorcism. A colleague with three teenagers told me a year or so ago that young American adults can’t write in cursive aside from signing their names. That horrified me. Some schools are teaching penmanship again but, of course, penmanship relies on literacy, not, I hear, a strong suit especially in union-run public schools.

I was a teacher for years and still consider myself as much a teacher as an art historian, so Alibaba got a good lesson from me in American clichés. Since this year is America’s 250th anniversary, and I hope that Alibaba will be an American citizen one day, and since he’s living in New Milford, Conn., I also gave him a tutorial on Roger Sherman, New Milford’s most eminent citizen and the only man to sign the Continental Declaration, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. Sherman was the éminence grise behind each of these foundational documents, the skilled negotiator and deal maker.

Alibaba’s English is very good — when it comes to Pashto or Dari, I know nada — but I wonder how much of my Shermaniana he grasped. No matter. He’s a wonderful artist and a new Old Master.

I like the Afghans by and large. Many live in the Stone Age, I know, but they like it and have been much put-upon. Our adventure in Afghanistan was among the defining fiascos of our ruling elite and their two-party machine. I’m glad good artists like Alibaba survived it. This is a good moment to think about Persian calligraphy, his inspiration. I like the long-suffering Iranians, too. Their time is now.