Museums, Social Media, and Public Space

This NYUAD Institute talk considers how artworks operate across different contexts, from museums and galleries to public spaces and digital circulation. Drawing on over 15 years of experience, Bahia Shehab reflects on how audience engagement shifts when art is encountered within institutional settings versus when it is publicly displayed and exposed to everyday life. Through examples from projects in cities such as New York, Istanbul, Marrakesh, and Hawaii, the talk looks at how art travels, remains relevant across geographies, and is shaped by social media.

The speaker is a practising artist and a professor of practice in design (and founder of the graphic design programme) at The American University in Cairo, where she developed a full design curriculum mainly focused on the visual culture of the Arab world.