For the first time ever, Jeff Badger’s artwork will be featured in a gallery outside the continental United States. A lifelong artist and studio art professor at Southern Maine Community College, Badger said being featured in a foreign gallery is a major leap for his career. 

“Every show is an evolution,” Badger said. “A lot of times I think of art in terms of music, this is like my new album.”

Where will Badger’s work hang – some grand and historic gallery in Italy, France or Spain?

Try Vice-President of Iraqi Plastic Artists Society and Secretary of the Iraqi Cultural Council Qassim Sabti’s gallery in downtown Baghdad.

Badger said he wasn’t surprised when he received an email from his friend Peter Buotte, currently stationed in Mahmudiyah, Iraq as a civil affairs officer for the Army asking him and other artists throughout the state to submit their work for a month-long show in the recently reopened gallery that Badger said has become “a flagship for the cultural downtown” in Baghdad. 

“We’ve been in shows together and had many adventures,” Badger said. “This is the kind of thing Peter usually does.”

The concept for the exhibit budded from a conversation between Buotte and Ahmed Hassoon, an Iraqi linguist Buotte worked with during his first tour, Badger said. Once Hassoon realized Buotte had a passion for the arts – in 2005 Buotte traveled for a year as part of his “tell me where to go and what to do” project – Hassoon connected Badger with his uncle Sabti, a well known painter in Baghdad who agreed to host the exhibit in his gallery. 

There is no major theme for the exhibit, and 23 artists from the U.S., Canada, France and Australia have already sent their work to the Department of State and U.S. Military office in Mahmudiyah, where Buotte will be able to preview the pieces before sending them another 30 miles to Baghdad where they will remain on display for all of October. The exhibit is titled “Merhaba Baghdad,” an informal greeting in Turkish and Iraqi Arabic.

“It’s like saying ‘Hello,’ from the contemporary art world outside Iraq,” Badger said. “Art can be a great chance for us to step back from everyday concerns. The fact the show doesn’t have to be about war and destruction is a sign of progress.”

An un-themed exhibit allowed Badger to begin working on an idea he said was inspired by his wife, who was pregnant with their 1-year-old son, Ernie Badger, when he began working on the piece for the “Merhaba Baghdad” show more than a year ago. 

“I got thinking about cells and how they decide what to be,” he said. “All of a sudden one cell will become an arm, another a leg and eventually you have a whole person.”

Thoughts about his unborn son combined with a theory involving what Badger described as an “arboreal model of history” that merged with his passion for nautical literature and he found himself painting vivid and colorful tree figures in a variety of scenes.

“Work usually starts with an image,” he said. “I had his idea of opening up a ship and seeing plants.”

Unlike traditional Iraqi art, which Badger said spurred from Arabic calligraphy and is often abstract to abide by Islamic beliefs that prohibit artists from depicting specific images, Badger’s pieces follow several tree figures in a number of different environments. Badger said he did not let his work be influenced by the location it is to be displayed; one image of several figures in a life raft includes a seasick tree. 

“It’s only appropriate to send my work and what I do,” he said. “It would be presumptuous to assume what Iraqis would find acceptable.”

Badger said he had already sent his final pieces to Mahmudiyah and was looking forward to getting feedback from a foreign audience, but would most likely be unable to visit the exhibit himself. 

“Do I want to go to Baghdad? Probably not,” he said. “Having a kid changes your sense of adventure.”

As the former director of the Space Gallery in Portland and having worked at Maine College of Art, Badger said having his art featured in the “Merhaba Baghdad” exhibit is a satisfying result of staying in touch with other artists and gaining a presence in the local art scene – a step he said is important for beginning artists to remember when starting out in their careers. 

“It’s easy to forget, to fall out of touch, but you have to get advice from other artists and stay in touch,” he said. “Artists are the key to the art world, it’s not the critics or the galleries.”

To learn more about the “Merhaba Baghdad” exhibit visit the Qassim Sabti gallery Web site www.qasimsabti.com.