On a sunny March day in 1938, an American-owned oil company in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, drilled into a gold mine—an area that would soon be identified as the largest source of petroleum in the world. Life in the Middle East changed quickly after that. The influx of prosperity brought all kinds of development, and in the arts, modernist pioneers emerged from the country’s folds. Important exhibitions opened at the Al Mubarakiya School in Kuwait and the Saudi House of Fine Arts in Riyadh, and progressive collectives began forming: Bahrain’s Manama Group, the Three Friends radical collective in Qatar, and the artists known as The Group of Five. In this unprecedented exhibition, the curator Dr. Aisha Stoby offers a new perspective on art history in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, collectively known as the Khaleej. —Elena Clavarino