It’s harvest season and I am excited to share that my 2023 print catalogue is now available online. 2023 has been a watershed year in my printmaking practice, with a huge wave of new activity made possible by a generous grant from the Center for Craft. The catalogue documents new editions in woodblock printmaking and etching, as well as many unique variable works. You can access it here.
Patterning - Group exhibition opening at North Loop, Williamstown, June 10
This season’s inaugural group show brings together artists considering pattern across a range of media, forging new connections between textile and painting, ceramic, and printmaking. Working and reworking material through felting, weaving, mark-making, and dyeing, these artists explore the repetition inherent to pattern in both process and form. Pattern—often relegated to the margin—becomes the center, whether conceptually or compositionally.
In these works, patterns and textiles hold histories and narratives both personal and collective, offering insights into familial, cultural, and material memory rooted in the texture of daily life.
Sanctuaries - Solo exhibition, ARC Fine Art, Fairfield, CT - opening April 22
ARC Fine Art is pleased to announce Sanctuaries, a solo exhibition by interdisciplinary artist Alyssa Sakina Mumtaz. Moving rhythmically between geometric abstraction and aniconic representations of divine presence, the drawings, paintings, woodblock prints, and textiles on view in the exhibition reflect the diversity of Mumtaz’s work over ten years of practice. Linked by the common thread of contemplative inquiry, Mumtaz’s abstractions evoke metaphysical spatial concepts: prayer niches and narrow gates; radiating stars that are at once cosmological and architectural; gardens of paradise inscribed on silk. Developed in parallel, her anthropomorphic works depicting prayer beads, hovering robes, and supplicating hands explore gestures of prayer that bridge the human and the divine. As an American-born Muslim deeply influenced by sacred art across traditions, Mumtaz’s visual language bears witness to the material culture of Muslim belief as well as forms of devotional Americana that resonate with her rural upbringing.
Alyssa Sakina Mumtaz is an artist and educator working at the intersections of art, craft, and contemplative practice. She attended Yale University and completed her MFA in visual art at Columbia. Mumtaz’s creative projects and research have been supported by grants and fellowships from the Center for Craft, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, MASS MoCA, the Berkshire-Taconic Community Foundation, the Kittredge Fund, the Lighton International Artist Exchange Program, the Mid Atlantic Art Foundation, Dieu Donné, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Neiman Center for Print Studies at Columbia. Her work has been exhibited and collected internationally, including solo presentations in Karachi, Mumbai, New York, London and Palma, as well as curated group exhibitions at institutions including the Seattle Art Museum; the University of Buffalo Art Galleries; Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs; KMAC, Louisville; the Weatherspoon Art Museum; White Columns, and IPCNY. She lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Sanctuaries will open with an artist’s reception on Saturday, April 22nd from 6 to 8pm and will be on view through May 26th at ARC Fine Art, located at 3113 Bronson Road in Fairfield, Connecticut. The artist will give brief remarks at the opening reception at 6:45pm.
New interview available online in Issue 116 of Image Journal
Center for Craft Teaching Artist Cohort Grant
I am so excited and honored to be a part of the inaugural 2023 Center for Craft Teaching Artist Cohort grant community! This opportunity is particularly close to my heart because it has emerged from my return to teaching after a hiatus of almost five years. From 2006 to 2018 I taught drawing, painting, printmaking and design in university art programs—first as a graduate student and later as an itinerant adjunct professor roving between Lahore, Pakistan, Charlottesville, VA, Washington DC and New York City. It was an exhausting way of life but I learned a lot in the process. When my children were born in 2018 and 2019 I decided to step back from teaching to focus on our family. The pandemic lengthened my intended hiatus and made me wonder if I would ever get back on the horse. Thankfully, I am back it, and have been teaching printmaking at Williams College, in the best possible company. With the help of this grant I am investing in new projects and branches of my practice that I hope to share in this context and beyond.