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Courtesy Jackson Fine Arts, Lalla Essaydi
Lalla Essaydi Conflicted Identities #5, 2023
From the venue:
Conflicted Identities April 11 – July 27, 2024
Lalla Essaydi is a Moroccan-born artist living and working in the USA. Lalla Essaydi earned her Master in Fine Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/TUFTS University in May 2003. The artist is now represented by two galleries in the United States: the Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston and the Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York City.
Lalla Essaydi’s work is deeply inspired by her Moroccan heritage and is noteworthy for its combination of Islamic calligraphy with artistic renderings of the female body. Through her work, Essaydi explores the complexities of Arab female identity which she imbues with her personal experiences as an Arab woman. Lalla Essaydi often looks back on her childhood in Morocco to express experiences of girlhood from the retrospective position of adulthood. In doing so, Essaydi explores notions of displacement, uncertainty, and the entwining of past and present.
The artist uses different media, including painting, videography, film, analog photography, and installation pieces. Across her work, Lalla Essaydi frequently appropriates Orientalist imagery taken from the Western artistic tradition. In doing so, she invites viewers to recontextualize Oriental mythologies and counter distorted narratives of Arab culture perpetuated by the Western lens.
Essaydi’s photographs serve to document intimate spaces and temporalities; primarily those of the artist’s own childhood. Essaydi’s work is the physical manifestation of her exploration of identity and home in both physical and psychological terms. Through her photographs, Essaydi returns to the culture of her childhood and seeks to re-encounter her childhood self-whilst exploring her relationships with the converging territories which make up her current existence.
Essaydi’s photography features domestic spaces in deterioration and comes to represent the metaphorical spaces of her childhood and the converging spaces that she now navigates in adulthood. Her portrayal of women revokes notions of western sexual fantasy perpetuated by the fiction of “Orientalism” and her depiction of “space” marks a striking move away from public life and towards private life. In doing so, Essaydi casts her focus on the sphere of womanhood as opposed to male-dominated public spaces.
Lalla Essaydi’s photographs have been exhibited in cities across the United States and internationally, including exhibitions in Japan, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, Sharjah, and the United Kingdom. Her work is represented across a number of notable collections, including the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Fries Museum, Williams College Museum of Art, and The Kodak Museum of Art.
Essaydi’s book, Crossing Boundaries, Bridging Cultures (2015), delves deeper into Essaydi’s fascination with physical and social spaces across divergent locations and cultures. The monograph offers readers a critical exploration of the female Arab identity and includes essays and luscious illustrations exploring the major themes that underpin much of Essaydi’s photographic work.
Shanequa Gay
Gateway to the South April 11 – July 27, 2024
Shanequa Gay is a visual artist born in Atlanta, GA. She is primarily known for her surrealist acrylic paintings focusing on the multiple universes within the spirit of the Black Woman. Her work evaluates tradition, place, storytelling, and subject matter to develop imaginative dialogues and alternative strategies for self-imaging.
Through her paintings, illustrations, videos, performance, and monumental sculpture figures, Gay fabricates environments of memorials and rituals. With this, she depicts mythical figures, new gods, and images of people affected by inequality.
Gay graduated and earned her BA in Painting from Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), AA in Graphic Design and Fashion Marketing from the Art Institute of Atlanta, and an MFA from Georgia State University. A few of Gay’s notable works, Devout Griot and The Fair Game Project, encompass a thematic vision of hybrid beings as the central focus. Devout Griot explores the historical and contemporary social concerns of hybrid cultures through the gaze of the female ancestor and how these cultures have often been rendered invisible and their identities denied. This interpretation also holds true when viewing The Fair Game Project, where these hybrid subjects “represent black men being hunted” as noted in an interview by Gay in Black Art in America.
Gay’s multidisciplinary practice offers a different perspective about various topics but also elicits imagination. Her works often use vibrant colors, mixed media, and sharp lines to capture raw emotions—with her sensitive topics sometimes attracting mixed reactions.
Shanequa Gay lives and works in her native city of Atlanta, Georgia where she is also an active member of the Atlanta art community. In her career, Gay has garnered many accolades, including being one of 10 artists selected for OFF THE WALL, a city-wide Civil Rights and Social Justice Mural initiative led by WonderRoot and the Atlanta 2018 Super Bowl Host Committee. Gay’s other achievements include her selection to be the illustrator for the First Lady’s Luncheon hostess gift for First Lady Michelle Obama in 2013, television and film features in Lionsgate’s Addicted, the BET series Being Mary Jane and Zoe Ever After, and the 2016 OWN series Greenleaf.
Gay has exhibited her work at prestigious venues and events including the Chattanooga African American Museum, the Hunter Museum of American Art, the Hammonds House Museum, Emory University, Mason Murer, the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, and the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Her work is among public and private collections including actor Samuel L. Jackson and the permanent collection for SCAD Hong Kong. Gay also exhibits her works in Japan and South Africa.
In 2022, Shanequa Gay will participate in the European Cultural Centre’s exhibition within the context of the 59th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy.
Through the Lens of Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, and Eudora Welty
April 11 – July 13, 2024
In the viewing room, discover an exhibition of works by iconic photographers Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, and Ben Shahn from the 1930s. Through their lenses, these renowned artists captured the essence of America during a pivotal era, offering glimpses into the lives of ordinary people and the social landscape of the time. From Evans’ evocative portraits to Rothstein’s powerful documentation of the Dust Bowl and Shahn’s poignant images of rural life, this selection presents a compelling visual narrative of the Great Depression era.
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