Officially opened in 1972, the Jordan Museum of Popular Traditions was Amman's first public museum to exhibit modern objects. With materials collected from across the region, including Palestinian, Syrian, and late Ottoman dress, jewelry, amulets, and devotional objects, the collection offers the lived practices and tangible heritage of communities from the late 19th to 20th century. In making the museum, founder Saadiya al-Tel and her nephew, artist Ali Jabri (1942-2002), sought to preserve and promote cultural heritage beyond the nationalist narratives of Jordan’s ancient archaeological sites. Instead, Jabri deftly crafted the museum as a creative expression of modernity through everyday, cultural, and religious objects from a a rapidly disappearing past. Jabri’s curation of the museum offers a largely unknown example of a modern artist engaging with historical heritage as pliable matter for creative worldmaking. In doing so, artists across the modernizing Middle East including Shakir Hassan Al Said in Baghdad, Marcos Grigorian in Tehran, and Ali Jabri channeled their curatorial activities into new experiments with historical narratives and the representational possibilities of objects and images in works of art, or even within museum displays themselves. Jabri was a neo-realist painter whose work was fueled by his desire to document both past and present heritage of the Arab world, juxtaposing the uneven process of modernization as one commingling “ancient beauty and modern Warholian junk.” Such examples include paintings of talismanic practices with new electric appliances, collages composed from 1960s popular Egyptian magazines interspersed with tumultuous news headlines, and watercolor sketches of Fatimid and Mamluk architectural facades that radiate the heat of Cairo's modern nightlife. Like other artists who cultivated new ideas for creative work through a curatorial practice with historical objects, Jabri's work in the museum extended his documentary drive beyond paintings and into questions around Islamic heritage in modernity. He focused on devotional practices with extensive research on the historical and modern sacral objects in the museum. The museum thus mobilized Ali Jabri’s lifelong efforts to depict modernity in its "eternally changing" with the persistent presence of spiritual heritage. Working with Jabri’s personal artist sketchbooks, research notes, and archival documents, along with the museum’s collection and archive, this presentation explores Ali Jabri’s work in the museum as an important instance of an artist curating a museum of "popular traditions" as an act of artistic worldmaking.