From Grassroots to Global Stages: Celebrating 30 Years of the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation

During a tour of her Abu Dhabi home, Huda Alkhamis-Kanoo stops in a majlis dating back about 200 years, its walls lined with intricately carved wooden panels. The room once formed part of the home of a Christian family in the Levant and had been passed down through generations. Kanoo knew the family for years and understood why they never wanted to part with it. When recent conflict put the house and its contents at risk, however, they turned to her, trusting that she would preserve what the room represented. It was carefully dismantled, brought to Abu Dhabi and rebuilt in her home.

“No matter who we are or what we believe in, we have a responsibility to preserve our heritage, tell our story and pass it on,” Kanoo says. “This room belonged to a Christian family, but the principle is the same for all of us. Christians, Muslims, wherever we are, we preserve what carries our history.”

Kanoo grew up with that atmosphere in Beirut. Her mother cooked with music playing, her father hosted poets, businessmen and thinkers, and the sounds outside ranged from church bells to people calling in the street. “I lived with music, art, culture and literature,” she says. “It was at home, at school, outside. I lived it. It opened something in my heart.”

What Kanoo wanted to recreate in Abu Dhabi was that sense of culture as part of everyday life, shared among artists, families and young people. It became the purpose behind establishing the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation, now celebrating its 30th anniversary, and later its flagship event, Abu Dhabi Festival, which opens with a concert by the UAE National Orchestra at Etihad Arena.

To understand that journey, Kanoo recalls Admaf’s beginnings as a small desk at the Abu Dhabi offices of the Kanoo Group, the long-established Gulf family business, when Cultural Foundation and the National Theatre hosted much of the capital’s cultural activity.

“There was always this idea I found when I came to Abu Dhabi that culture was essential,” Kanoo says. “You can see that in some of the city’s most loved and historic buildings, which are now on the heritage register. Cultural Foundation was there. The National Theatre was there. I think the contribution I wanted to make by setting up Admaf was simply to widen that access further, particularly to young people.”

Kanoo went into public schools, organised buses and brought pupils to Cultural Foundation for concerts, operas and ballets. “I still remember watching the young people watching The Nutcracker at Cultural Foundation not long after we opened,” she recalls. “They were so enthralled. We had small gifts and a lunch box, but it was their reaction, seeing them happy. It was about exposing them to art and giving them an opportunity to decide for their lives in the future.”

In the early years, much of the work was funded by Kanoo and her husband, Mohamed Abdul Latif Kanoo, a businessman and self-taught painter and gallerist who has long been active in Abu Dhabi’s visual arts scene. “I didn’t know if I was going to be successful,” she says. “I couldn’t dare ask for public funds or private funds when I didn’t yet know if it would work.”

As Admaf and Abu Dhabi Festival grew, international co-commissions became another way of extending that exchange, collaborating with institutions such as the Manchester International Festival, Holland Festival, Teatro Real, Gran Teatre del Liceu, and Opera national de Paris. Reciprocal partnerships, including those with the Seoul Museum of Art, also helped take UAE art abroad.

Reflecting on the evolution of Abu Dhabi’s cultural landscape—from Louvre Abu Dhabi and NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Centre to the institutions of Saadiyat Cultural District—Kanoo emphasizes that culture's true value extends far beyond ticket sales and economic impact. “Culture lives for years to come,” she says. “It is the impact, the influence, the thinking and the creativity it inspires.”