Between Latin America and the Levant: Bibi Zogbé’s Transnational Modernist Legacy as a Diasporic Woman Artist

The prolific production of Arab-Argentine artist, Bibi Zogbé, remains largely underexplored within the canon of art history– in part, due to the complex transnational nature of her creative work, but also because of inherent gender and Western biases that have traditionally dominated historiography. By closely examining the biography of this woman artist who immigrated from Lebanon to Argentina at the turn of the twentieth century, along with the work she produced associated with avant-garde circles, Bibi Zogbé emerges as an influential agent in the crafting of modernism between Latin America and the Levant. Though often reductively described as working in a “naïve primitive style” or referred to simply as a “painter of flowers,” Zogbé’s foliate imagery bears rich transnational meaning, representing a microcosm of her homeland through Islamic-inspired vegetal motifs. Furthermore, Zogbé spent a key period of her artistic career teaching and painting in Senegal and Lebanon, during which she markedly shifted her subject matter to focus on West African and Middle-Eastern landscapes and portraiture– a critical aspect of her production that has remained largely overlooked. This paper aims to unpack the complex artistic trajectories of Zogbé between the host country and the “old country,” along with the transnational identities negotiated between local and global imaginaries in her work. Reframing dominant discourses of artistic production beyond East/West divides, this examination of Zogbé’s oeuvre decenters Eurocentric narratives for a greater understanding of the diasporic dimensions of modernism between Latin America and the Middle East.