The Pollock-Krasner Foundation recently announced its 2020/21 grant recipients and I am so grateful to be among them. The new work that I have been doing since fall 2020 was made possible through the foundation’s exceptional generosity. I have written many grants over the years but this one felt particularly miraculous against the backdrop of the pandemic. My warmest thanks go to PKF’s encouraging staff, who really extended their hand to help me tell my story, and the three wonderful women who wrote in support of my grant.
Artist's Resource Trust Grant
When I relocated to western Massachusetts in summer 2018 I came as a trailing spouse with a two-month-old baby and no clear plan for how to continue my work as a teacher and artist in this region. Being isolated from my friends, supporters and past experiences, I learned quickly that the only way forward would be reinvention. For me this has meant finding a way to integrate my evolving art practice with my new path as a mother of two small children. In the wake of the pandemic, which turned life upside down just a month after my daughter’s birth, I found myself plunged into even deeper seclusion and uncertainty about my professional future. Thankfully, an Artist’s Resource Trust grant administered by the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, is playing an integral role in helping me reorient. Thanks to their support I am moving forward with new projects, including a body of work that will be presented in my forthcoming solo exhibition in Karachi in early 2022.
MASS MoCA Assets for Artists Grant
This year I was selected to participate in MASS MoCA’s Assets for Artists Program, a platform for professional cultivation, networking and capital investment for new developments in the studio. With the help of a matched savings grant I am pursuing a new direction in my work: establishing a conceptual textile practice centered on handloom weaving with a large upright tapestry loom. Using natural fibers and hand techniques similar to those used by traditional weavers, I am learning to make large-scale, functional woolen textiles based on a body of drawings that I have been developing over the past 10 years. My first project, a janamaz (prayer carpet) for my son Hadi, is underway.
Sound Affect - Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA
One of my 2007 song lyric drawings inspired by early American sampler embroidery is currently on view at the Seattle Art Museum. This work is also part of the museum’s permanent collection.
SOUND AFFECT
APR 27 – DEC 8, 2019
SEATTLE ART MUSEUM — THIRD FLOOR GALLERIES
Music and sound offer a path for artists exploring personal and cultural histories and real and imagined spaces. The works here range from the documentary and deadpan to the lyrical, contrasting and harmonizing in unexpected ways.
Robert Morris’s influential 1963 object and recording, Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, created a new consideration of artistic process as the artist recorded himself while he made this work. Decades later we are still in the room with the artist, listening to him hammering, sawing, sanding, and taking breaks. The work’s importance is evident in Jonathan Monk’s homage, a vinyl audio record with the misleading title “The Sound of Music.” If you expect songs by the Trapp family, you will be disappointed. Monk’s record plays the sounds made when the record was manufactured.
Isaac Layman’s photograph of a furniture-sized stereo provides a physical connection to the music experience even though the speakers are turned away from us. Alyssa Pheobus Mumtaz gives Leonard Cohen’s song lyrics a sensuous presence. Victoria Haven monumentalizes a mixed tape of personal significance. We can also contemplate the primordial personification of a scream, the suggestion of birdsong, and a range of topographies—from the suggestion of backyard aesthetics to more abstract ventures.
The photographs of a Nirvana performance take us back to a historic event, just as Ed Ruscha’s little book of records charts seismic shifts in the music scenes of the 1960s, from Otis Redding and Carla Thomas to Frank Zappa and the Velvet Underground.
