IVONNE BAKI - PAINTINGS of WOMEN of the MIDDLE-EAST..

Ivonne Baki is primarily known for being a diplomat, politician and the first female Ambassador from Ecuador. She was an ambassador to Qatar and later to the United States. BUT she is also an artist. This book catalogs some of her paintings of Middle-Eastern Women (she lived 19 years in Lebanon where she raised her family) as well as promotes her as an artist.

SIGNED & INSCRIBED by IVONNE BAKI on the inside front cover, below her photo: "Muy estimado Fred, Con todo cariño y amistad! Te deseos stempu felicidad! / Ivonne / Dec. 7th, 1991". Baki also wrote a sentence in Arabic below the Spanish inscription.

Softcovers, 8.5x11.5 inches, 46 pages. TEXT in FRENCH and ENGLISH.

ILLUSTRATED with 6 reproductions of Baki's paintings, a photograph of a young Baki at work, and a photograph of Baki on the inside front cover. The book also contains listings of her exhibitions, works in private collections, press articles, etc.

GOOD condition, the covers are pulling from the inner text block due to weak glue, but the sewn text block remains tightly bound; otherwise bright, clean and clear.

Publisher not stated, perhaps self-published; printed by NAHHAL, Beirut, Lebanon, c.1991 (the date of the inscription).

An unusual item from a formidable Ecuadorian woman.

About IVONNE BAKI (from Wikipedia):

******Ivonne Leila Juez Abuchacra de Baki (aka A-Baki), b.1951, is an Ecuadorian politician and diplomat. She is most known for her time as the Ecuadorian Minister of Industries and Productivity and as the President of the Andean Parliament. She is Ecuador's former Ambassador to Qatar and the United States. She is currently the Ecuadorian Ambassador to France. She was the first female ambassador in Ecuadorian history. She is fluent in Spanish, English, French, German and Arabic.

In 1998, she became the first woman in Ecuadorian history to represent her country in Washington as ambassador, and four years later, the first woman ever to run for president. A-Baki, as she is commonly known, spent 19 years in Lebanon, living through Lebanon's brutal 1975-90 civil war, and more recently has witnessed Ecuador's rapid slide into violence and gang warfare.

Yet "my first identity is as an artist," A-Baki told The Washington Diplomat some 25 years ago. "Art opens the right and left sides of your brain. It helps you see the whole picture. Music, poetry, painting and dancing make you more human. In order to be in politics, you have to be human. And that's what art does for me."******