New York Arab Festival Takes Over The Big Apple
DHAHRAN: For the next two months, New Yorkers will have plenty of chances to show up fashionably late for one of the activations at the third annual New York Arab Festival — but they won’t want to miss a thing.
The NYC-based festival, which runs April 7 to May 30 (with pre-festival events on April 5 and 6), has a curated program full of talks, performances, and artists amplifying all things Arab in the City That Never Sleeps.
Arab-American Heritage Month Celebration
The festival was established in 2022 to “celebrate Arab-American Heritage Month and fight the erasure of Arab and Arab-American identities from New York City — a place that Arabs have called home for over three centuries,” the organizers of NYAF said in a statement to Arab News.
During its first year, the festival was mostly clustered within the island of Manhattan, but has since spread across the boroughs, and even upstate.
The Visionaries Behind NYAF
It is the brainchild of two co-founders: Egyptian artistic director, Adham Hafez, who resides in New York; Adam Kucharski, an American who has called Saudi Arabia home for the last six years — he has curated a program for the festival called Raseef (which translates to sidewalk) dedicated to art, architecture, and urbanism. New York- and Japan-based creative, Cindy Sibilsky, the senior producer with bright hair and an even brighter smile, was also part of the founding team.
Empowering Arab Voices
And so NYAF was born. It is not ‘just’ an arts festival, although each of the founding members comes from an artistic practice, but an event where everyone is encouraged to reflect on and deconstruct the word ‘Arab.’
While the festival takes place in New York, there is a strong Saudi connection. Each of the founders is personally and professionally invested in amplifying the works of the Saudi participants, eager to further demystify the Kingdom and share a bit of it with New Yorkers.
Fostering Cultural Exchange
Naturally, the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza looms large over this year’s festival. But the team curated and crafted NYAF, in part, to open up discussions about these issues — to explore the way we interact with the news and the arts; to have people speak and listen in a safe space in order to foster a truly meaningful cultural exchange.
“These events connect NYAF artists with audiences, venues and our partners in NYC, the Arab world, and beyond,” Sibilsky told Arab News. “With so much tension and division right now, it’s vital and deeply heartening to bring people together, celebrate Arab voices, and encourage understanding.”