Beard was introduced to Neamatalla, the museum’s founder, by the famed archaeologist Zahi Hawass, the former minister of antiquities for Egypt, and a friend of Nejma’s parents (Hawass is attending the museum’s inauguration). In 2001, Peter, Nejma, and Zara made a trip to Siwa, as well as Luxor, Cairo, and Aswan, and he returned several times.
As Zara writes in her text for the catalogue, “He did not arrive with conquest in his eyes. He came instead as a witness. As someone who believed that beauty, when glimpsed on the verge of disappearance, becomes a kind of moral imperative. We travelled to Egypt as a family. My father was fascinated by everything: the palimpsest of civilizations, the carved stones still half-buried in sand, the exquisite ruins, the legend of the Oracle, the movement of salt across centuries. To him, beauty was inseparable from time. It was not ornamental but geological, shaped by erosion, intention, and the passage of centuries. Every artifact spoke in echoes.”
Like the hotel, the museum was hand-built from Siwa mud and is entirely off-grid. Its collection includes Beard’s iconic large-scale photographs, embellished with hand-painted borders by the Hog Ranch Art Department, a collective of Kenyan friends and artists, which was born in Beard’s property near the Ngong Hills. One gallery displays pages from Beard’s famous diaries, each a small collage artwork in itself. Another is filled with his personal family photos.
Ultimately, the museum is intended to be a “permanent tribute to Peter Beard’s life, his time in Siwa, his work, and as a living testament to the belief that beauty and responsibility to the earth can and must coexist,” as the opening announcement reads. Peter Beard’s legacy may be complex, but there is no doubt of his farsightedness, of his profound understanding of the ways of the world, both natural and human, and of his position as one of the great artists of the 20th century.
Below, “For the Record of the Living,” a poem by Zara Beard.
This is not silence—
It is the desert remembering.
He gathered what the world chose to forget,
And laid it down in blood and paper.
Salt keeps what time cannot
Love keeps what death cannot.
Enter as a witness.
The wild is not gone
It is only waiting
To be seen.
