PHOENIX — First, the men cursed him, loyalists of Iraq's Mahdi Army militia furious at the slender barber who dared to sketch pictures of nude women. Then, they spat on him, blindfolded him and punched him as they took him through a busy neighborhood market in his native Baghdad, where someone grabbed a pair of scissors and cut his long hair.
The abuse did not end there for the barber, Bassim al-Shaker, who was beaten so badly that he spent two weeks recuperating in a hospital. But he is much more than a barber. In June, he was in Italy, his oil paintings gracing the Iraq Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. In July, he arrived here in the American West, one of six foreign artists plucked from their countries to share their knowledge and create.
For Mr. Shaker, 28, the experience is as much about liberation as it is about escape.
In Baghdad, he used to paint in the middle of the night to avoid the unnerving cacophony of sirens, horns and explosions that punctuates the city's daytime rhythms. He dreaded walking the streets, a stage for deadly suicide bombings. He feared for his life, as the men who tortured him got out of prison this year and vowed to go after him to seek revenge, thinking it was because of him that they had wound up behind bars.
Mr. Shaker's journey from Iraq to Arizona began on a clear spring morning in Baghdad, when he found himself racing through an alley, jumping across rooftops and climbing over fences to escape his pursuers, eventually finding temporary harbor in a house behind an Iraqi Army blockade. Artists here and there came to his rescue, rekindling old connections to figure out a way to keep him alive.
He left his home country for a city that is home to one of the largest Iraqi communities in the United States — most of them refugees to whom this is a first stop, the rest transplants who chose to move here because of its familiar desert climate and reasonable cost of living. Mr. Shaker came as neither. He is an artist on a business visa, fueled by the freedom to put on canvas "whatever is in my heart," he said.
Much of it is colored by a lifetime of wars, repression and sanctions, which is pretty much all that he has known. From an apartment in the building where he has been staying — close to the light-rail train that takes him to the Arizona State University Art Museum, the international artists' host in neighboring Tempe — he has been working on a portrait of a wrinkly man wearing a kaffiyeh, the traditional headdress of men in Iraq. He is using black and white oil paints "because life in Iraq is black and white," lacking the joy that, to him, bright colors would represent.
On a recent morning, stylish in blue sunglasses and skinny jeans, Mr. Shaker said he made his living cutting hair in Baghdad, but art has always been his calling. His father tools leather. Some of his uncles are musicians — one plays percussion and another plays oud, the pear-shaped guitar. When he was in elementary school, he used to lose himself in the arts-and-crafts room, drawing his "expression of life," he said.
He spoke through an interpreter, Layal Rabat, 30, who was born into a Christian family in Syria and who, like Mr. Shaker, has uneasy feelings about religion. Mr. Shaker is a Sunni Muslim by virtue of his blood ties and tradition, but, by self-definition, "I'm not Muslim, I'm not Christian, I'm not anything," he said, and that is as much as he was willing to say about it.
To Mr. Shaker, Ms. Rabat has been the safe bridge into a world of new discoveries, like happy-hour drinks at the Lost Leaf, a bar, gallery and concert hall off Roosevelt Street, the aorta of this city's arts scene.
"Anything that's forbidden is desired," he said, a nod to the types of things he could not do in Baghdad, but always wanted to, like having a beer with friends or setting his imagination free to take his art wherever he wants.
Mr. Shaker said he had just returned to Baghdad from Cairo this spring when three men began chasing him after they spotted one another in a busy alley.
The drawings that got him in trouble were sketches of the Venus de Milo, practice for the entrance exam at Baghdad University's College of Fine Arts. He kept them on a notepad next to the barbershop's water cooler, where the militiamen found them when they stopped by for haircuts.
In Cairo, Mr. Shaker was one of eight budding artists attending a series of workshops sponsored by Sada (Echo) for Contemporary Iraqi Art, a nonprofit project founded in 2010 to foster artistic practices in a country whose arts scene has been choked by rising religious fundamentalism and years of unrest.
Once he was back in Baghdad, his pursuers forced him into hiding in the house behind the army blockade. He was there for about a month, confined to a small second-floor room, "eating and sleeping," he said, "like a prison."
Concerned about Mr. Shaker's safety, Sada's founding director, Rijin Sahakian, an Iraqi expatriate who had hired him in 2010 to manage the group's activities in Baghdad, contacted Gordon Knox, director of the university art museum, for whom she had worked curating an exhibition of Iraqi artists in California. She knew Mr. Knox had started a residency program for foreign artists in Phoenix and wondered if Mr. Shaker could join.
"He's obviously very talented," Ms. Sahakian said in a telephone interview from Beirut, Lebanon, where she lives, "but we were also focused on saving his life."
Mr. Shaker is unique among the artists in the residency program because of his past and circumstances. Other residents, current and former, have come from places like Portugal, England, Denmark and Mexico.
They live and work in the same building downtown, called Combine Studios, and they meet graduate students at Arizona State's school of arts for an exchange of sorts — "enriching to both," Mr. Knox said.
Mr. Shaker is finishing an installation for a gallery, and he is plotting his next project: painting an American flag on the side of a shipping container that sits on an empty lot nearby, replacing the stars with the black-and-gold eagle in the Iraqi coat of arms. It is, he said, the ultimate symbol of the countries he carries under his skin.
His visa expires at the end of the year, but he has tried not to dwell on it. Once he goes back to Baghdad, he will move to a different neighborhood, he said, hoping that a new address in a new part of town will be enough to keep him safe.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 29, 2013
An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect name and location of a bar and gallery that Bassim al-Shaker visits. It is the Lost Leaf, not the Loose Leaf, and is off Roosevelt Street, not Roosevelt Avenue.
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