Decades of regional conflict, refugee migrations to Jordan, and ongoing neoliberal urban development have exacerbated widespread experiences of absence and dislocation in Amman, a capital city long maligned as lacking the cultural, political, and economic significance required of truly cosmopolitan centers. At the same time, these processes have accelerated rapid growth in the public art scene, as state institutions work to turn Amman into a world-class arts hub, international governments patronize public art as diplomacy, and the vast NGO sector incorporates arts programs into their humanitarian and development agendas. This state and institutional art patronage reflect a global uptick in humanitarian arts programs and “creative cities” development projects that promote public art as a universal and nonpartisan tool for improving life in economically dispossessed and politically turbulent contexts. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines the embodied experiences of young graffiti and street artists in Amman as they navigate structures of art patronage that both enable and constrain their efforts. On the one hand, interconnected state and institutional networks provide artists with opportunities to share their work and make some income through commissions in this resource-scarce country with high unemployment. On the other hand, Jordan-based artists are often marginalized within developmentalist and racialized hierarchies that position them as lacking skills and expertise compared with primarily Euro-American “international artists” who are increasingly participating in the city’s political economy of commissioned public art. I elaborate the concept of “ajānib fatigue,” or fatigue with foreigners, to ethnographically demonstrate the everyday impacts of institutional “regimes of value” (Appadurai 1986; Myers 2001; Winegar 2006) that place Jordan-based artists at a disadvantage as they build livelihoods and local artistic communities. I draw on my interlocutors’ use of the Arabic word for “foreigners” as a racialized descriptor of white and globally mobile Euro-Americans. I highlight the affective atmosphere (Anderson 2005) of exhaustion infusing their efforts to cope with widespread inequities rather than resist them outright. This paper provides insights into shifting artistic landscapes in the Middle East art since the 2011 uprisings, when public art and performance played a substantial role in shaping collective energies of dissent and political reimagination. Moreover, it calls into question universalist assumptions about art as a core feature of healthy and liberated societies.