The Future of Traditions, Writing Pictures: Contemporary Art From the Middle East features three generations of artists from the Middle East, from the early pioneers of a vernacular Lettrism movement in the 1960s until now. These artists take inspirations from their own cultures using the morphology of letters and phonemes, the rhymes and rhythms of calligraphy, as well as abstractions of words into pictures and thoughts into images. The result over the past six decades has been the creation of alternate approaches to modernism and contemporary art.