Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Centre

The Art Centre carries on Ramses Wissa Wassef's conviction that artistic creativity is innate in everyone and can flourish when given freedom.

Founded in 1951 by the architect Ramses Wissa Wassef (1911–1974), the Art Centre in Harrania near Giza was built in traditional mud-brick vaulted architecture and received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. Children from the village were taught to weave without preliminary drawings, developing a distinctive tradition of wool and cotton tapestries coloured with natural dyes grown on site; a batik group has worked under Johanna Wissa Wassef since 1974. The centre includes active workshops, a tapestry museum completed in 1989 tracing the development of individual weavers, the Habib Gorgi Museum of figurative sculpture (1971), a gallery selling new tapestries, batiks and ceramics, and gardens. Its tapestries are in collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum.