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Culture & Religion

Toward Cultural Revolution in Egypt

“What Egypt needs is a durable social movement that decades from now can influence politicians and decision-makers.” Osama Diab at The Guardian is nostalgic for flower power.
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“What Egypt needs is a durable social movement that decades from now can influence politicians and decision-makers.” Osama Diab at The Guardian is nostalgic for flower power. “Whether we agree or disagree with the values of the hippy movement, one can’t deny that it had its own distinctive culture creating one of the strongest social revolutions in history. Its emphasis on equality and environmental and pacifist values still influence the world today, and its subculture became part of American mainstream culture in the 1970s. Here in Egypt, a country that puts so much emphasis on people’s gender, social class and religion, a strong grassroots social movement and a subculture needs to emerge with a list of social, political and environmental demands.”

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American Impressionism’s often been seen as a pale copy of the French Impressionism that flowered in the late 19th century. Although American Impressionists early on copied their French counterparts (and even made pilgrimages to Monet’s Giverny garden and home), the exhibition The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement, 1887–1920, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts through May 24, 2015, proves that American Impressionism quickly blossomed into something distinct—and distinctly American—by the turn of the 20th century. Capturing aesthetically a moment of contradictions as American nativism threatened to close borders while women’s suffrage struggled to open doors, The Artist’s Garden demonstrates the power of flowers to speak volumes about the American past, and present.

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