Lawh Wa Qalam: M. F. Husain Comes Home to Education City

Doha is about to gain a museum that feels less like a building and more like an invitation. Lawh Wa Qalam: M. F. Husain Museum opens this November at Qatar Foundation’s Education City, bringing one of modern art’s most prolific, shape-shifting voices into a space designed to breathe with his work. The date matters, but so does the promise: an immersive, multi-format encounter with Husain’s world, from paintings and film to tapestry, photography, and poetry, staged so that visitors can walk through the ideas that animated him. 

The project carries a deeply personal thread. Years ago, Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser commissioned Husain to create a series inspired by Arab civilization. He completed more than thirty-five works before he passed. Some of those pieces will anchor the museum’s galleries, turning a commission into a public inheritance. The architecture itself follows Husain’s hand: the building mirrors a conceptual sketch he drew for a museum that would read like a work of art in its own right. It is rare to see an artist’s lines become a city’s lines. Here, they do.

A sketch by Maqbool Fida Husain, depicting his imaginative vision of Lawh Wa Qalam: M. F. Husain Museum ; Image Source : QM

What the museum promises is not only display, but dialogue. Education City is already a dense ecosystem of learning, research, sport, and public art. This new address extends that rhythm. Families and students will be able to move from classrooms to galleries to gardens and back again, with Husain’s modernism acting as connective tissue. The institution’s curatorial language is contemporary and accessible: stories told through multimedia, archives that illuminate process as much as product, and programming designed to invite first-time museumgoers as confidently as seasoned viewers. 

A special note for anyone who has stood before Seeroo fi al ardh, the sweeping installation widely regarded as Husain’s final masterpiece. It will live inside the museum as a gallery experience, presented with a dedicated show that reintroduces its choreography of progress and invention. For Doha residents who visit the work outdoors, the museum’s chapter will add context; for new audiences, it becomes a point of entry into Husain’s late-style bravura. 

The team behind the museum frames its mission with clarity: inspiration, creativity, and critical thinking for audiences of all ages. That ethos sits comfortably within Qatar Foundation’s broader vision to weave education and culture into everyday life. Education City now hosts more than a hundred pieces of public art; the Husain museum strengthens that network and gives it a living studio at the center. Expect learning programs, cross-disciplinary collaborations, and a physical footprint of over 3,000 square meters that can hold both intimate encounters and large public moments. 

Lawh Wa Qalam: M. F. Husain Museum in Education City ; Image Source : QM

There is also a quiet, beautiful symmetry to the name. Lawh Wa Qalam :“tablet and pen”, speaks to making, to writing, to leaving a trace. Husain left many. This museum gathers them with care, situating a singular Indian modernist within a regional conversation about heritage, innovation, and the futures we build when art is given room to lead.

Opening: November 28, 2025, at Education City, Doha. More visitor information will be released closer to the date. Follow the museum on Instagram and Facebook, or reach the team via [email protected] for media inquiries. 

For Doha, this is more than an opening. It is a new way to see, across time, across mediums, across the lines of a sketch that has finally become a door.