This Friday, City Lore Gallery reopens with
Poetic Voices of the Muslim World. In keeping with the exhibition, we are proud to feature
Laimah Osman at the City Lore Gift Shop. Laimah calls her work "visual poetry" and draws from the rich Persian calligraphic tradition to create works that break language barriers.
For Osman, words are containers for emotion. She experiments with them visually--letters become shapes and lose their meaning. As an immigrant in this country, she knows how it feels to be excluded and isolated from public dialogue and spaces. She wants her art to speak to many people: English readers, Farsi readers, and those who cannot read. Experiencing the work is enough.
Osman's themes of love and longing are based in Persian poetry, her mantras of compassion are based in Buddhist philosophy, and her screenprinting approach is a shout out to Sister Mary Corita Kent.
She makes this work thinking about her parents and her own early experiences of arriving to a new country. She wants to offer tactile experiences for those who are left out of a dominant language and culture.
Laimah Osman's work has been displayed in numerous exhibitions and is archived in libraries including Yale and Stanford University. She has been awarded residencies at The Lower East Side Printshop, Kala Art Institute and Women's Studio Workshop, as well as a grant from Jerome Foundation.
She gradated with a BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University (1998); and an MFA from Pratt Institute (2010). Please visit Osman's website to view more of her work.
Her work will be available for sale at the City Lore Gift Shop until April 9th, 2017. City Lore Gallery and Gift Shop are open Fridays 2 - 6pm, weekends from 12 - 6pm and by appointment. To make an appointment, email Liz at [email protected]. Admission to the exhibit is free.
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