(1) Mohammed al Hamadany's Night of Fire series; (2) Sadik Jaffar's Self-Portrait; (3) Mohammed Hamdan's Bagdadiyat; (4) Sat'aar Darweesh's Untitled; (5) Bassam Khadum's Untitled.   (Photo: Courtesy of The Artists.)

“Everything that happened in Baghdad I saw with my own eyes,” said Al Hamadany. “I saw Saddam’s statue when it was torn down, I saw the rape of women, I saw people stealing, I saw everything. These images were engraved in my head, and my paintings are an expression of what I saw.” Al Hamadany said his brother, a former cabinet minister under Saddam Hussein, was murdered by Saddam’s thugs. Hussein’s presence looms in Al Hamadany’s work, but in unexpected ways. In his largest canvas in the series, Al Hamadany focuses on the felling of Hussein’s statue, showing a cheering crowd of monkeylike onlookers in Baghdad’s central square. These were the same people, he said, who had cheered when the statue had gone up.

I asked Al Hamadany why he had been willing to trust Brownfield with so much of his work. He said that he and his fellow artists wanted to let the world know that, even in these dark times, art was still flourishing in Iraq. But barely. “Some artists are being forced to sell oranges and vegetables in the streets of Baghdad—that is how they are surviving,” he told me. “Others have immigrated to the U.A.E. and are working very menial jobs, like cleaning the streets.”

Brownfield, for his part, has been dipping into debt to prepare the exhibition. The project, he says, has helped him see the Iraqi conflict more clearly than he did during his months on active duty—when “I was living on a submarine and lied to.” He plans to enroll in the international-studies program at Johns Hopkins this fall.

“Christopher Brownfield,” says Al Hamadany, “is our bridge to the outside world.”