Art From The Mind's Eye

The story of Ramses Wissa Wassef and the Wissa Wassef Art Center's unique experiment in tapestry weaving that has become world renowned and continues to develop three generations later

Over the past 75 years, the Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Center in the village of Harrania, near Cairo, has reached world renown through the beauty of its tapestries and the sensitivity of its philosophy. What these works, and the other artistic creations of the centre reveal, is a beautiful truth: that all of us are born with a potential to be artists which, in the right circumstances, can flourish throughout our lives. 

Today tapestries by the Wissa Wassef weavers grace museums in the Middle East, North America and Europe, but when the project began in the streets of Old Cairo in the early 1940s no one could have predicted it would achieve such recognition. Then its founder Ramses Wissa Wassef was just a young man with an improbable dream. This book tells the story of where that dream came from, how he realised it and the ways in which it continues to develop three generations later.