In meeting and greeting the new Fine Arts Work Center fellows, both visual artists and writers who have arrived in October for their winter term from all over the U.S. and the world, something very down-to-earth becomes immediately apparent: How difficult it has become to live and work full-time as an artist. The opportunity afforded to the 20 fellows that’s most precious to them is a chance to devote themselves entirely to the work they love. No matter how welcoming the town is, and how beautiful a place it is, for most of them that economic reality transcends all other concerns.
The Shapes of Birds: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa Newport Art Museum
Over the past few decades, the Middle East and North Africa have experienced immense political, ideological, and sociological changes. In 2010, the world watched as the Tunisian Revolution became the “Arab Spring.” With the use of social media, activists and protestors organized protests, resisted their governments, and made the world aware of crimes against humanity. In the art world, recent years have brought an unprecedented number of exhibitions devoted to Islamic art and art of the “Arab World and Iran” or the “Middle East.”
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Counter Narratives: Geographies of the Unfamiliar RISD MFA Painting Class of 2018 Asya Geisberg Gallery Curated by Sara Reisman
Asya Geisberg Gallery is pleased to announce its late summer exhibition Counter Narratives: Geographies of the Unfamiliar featuring ten recent graduates of Rhode Island School of Design’s MFA Program in Painting. With a diversity of aesthetics and approaches to painting as a practice, the artists in the exhibition represent a unique range of possibilities afforded by painting. A number of artists in the exhibition use photography as a starting point – referencing family photos, images of quotidian objects and interiors – in order to document origin stories, political struggle, and personal journeys that have led to unexpected places and experiences.
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Art Out: Strange Beach | Musée Magazine
Fridman Gallery presents Strange Beach, an exhibition featuring the work of Arghavan Khosravi, Nate Lewis, and Tajh Rust. Each artist uses the human figure to highlight tensions and vulnerabilities symptomatic of our times.
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Editors' Picks: 16 Things Not to Miss in New York's Art World This Week | ArtNet News
Number 3 on the Editors’ Picks was Strange Beach, a group exhibition at Fridman’s Spring Street gallery featuring Arghavan Khosravi, Nate Lewis, and Tajh Rust. Each of the artists address the human figure, sometimes as a metaphor, sometimes as a literal vessel that bears the marks of life experience. All three artists will be present for the opening reception.
9 Art Events to Attend in New York City This Week | ArtNews
Opening: “Strange Beach” at Fridman Gallery “Strange Beach,” which brings together work by Arghavan Khosravi, Nate Lewis, and Tajh Rust, considers different ways to consider the human body. Figurative works abound, though each artist’s approach to the style is quite different. Lewis’s works on paper often center on social histories; Khosravi’s paintings, influenced by Persian miniature and Surrealism, grapple with notions of citizenship; and Rust’s portraits address perceptions of race.
Art This Week: Beach Bodies, Paintings, and Who Gets To Play Bedford + Bowery
Summertime is a time for going to the beach, but that’s not what this group exhibition at Fridman Gallery is about, despite the name. Rather, it’s a “metaphor for the body,” framing one’s physical form as a vessel of sorts that can advance, retreat, swallow up others, be intruded upon, amass debris and valuable items alike over time
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Strange Beach Exhibition Featured in Wall Street International
Fridman Gallery is pleased to present Strange Beach, an exhibition featuring the work of Arghavan Khosravi, Nate Lewis, and Tajh Rust. Each artist uses the human figure to highlight tensions and vulnerabilities symptomatic of our times. Strange Beach is a metaphor for the body—as a surface that exhibits and retains memories and social biases, as a unique algorithm that constructs behaviors on behalf of the self.
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RISD MFA Painting at Morgan Lehman Gallery →
Home has emerged as a powerful symbol during our present period of uncertainty. It’s a universal yet nebulous ideal that can migrate and adapt with us across continents. I couldn’t help but think about that unique but enigmatic sense of belonging that’s at the core of human relationships while looking at the work by these young artists, all of whom have infused their work with a notion of home.
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Four on the Floor No.02
Arghavan Khosravi is the youngest artist featured in issue #2, but her grasp of art history, and her will to activate it within her practice, is no less thoughtful than the others. An MFA Painting student at RISD, I found this work, Fath-Ali Shah Qajar, in her class’s current exhibition at Morgan Lehman. The show was strong, but this particular work, I dare say, was the strongest.
Fath-Ali Shah Qajar is part of a larger series that the artist has undertaken to appropriate and subvert the most ubiquitous portrait in the United States: that of George Washington on the one dollar bill. Moreover, Khosravi couples this desire with her careful study of the Ottoman, Persian, and Mughal traditions of miniatures, and more generally, Persian portraiture.
We find here a crisp one dollar bill that Khosravi has surgically dissected. A seal mid-right is overpainted in a decorative motif. One of the “1”s has been replaced with beautiful calligraphic script (Persian calligraphy, in fact, that spells out the Shah’s name). And in lieu of America’s first president we find Fath-Ali Shah Qajar himself, the second Shah of Iran who ruled from 1797 to 1834. Though forty years separated the men, their ascents to power occurred only a few years apart.
Fresh Eyes at Helen Day: MFA Students Shine →
Arghavan Khosravi, a native of Tehran, Iran, explores aspects of identity and political experience in a series of works on paper. Among the works on exhibition are four meticulously adorned wooden boxes that each encase an authentic Iranian passport intricately elaborated with imagery reminiscent of Persian miniatures. Upon closer look, a viewer- constructed narrative emerges from the juxtapositions of disparate traditional and contemporary figures and objects — for example, a group of veiled women, a gun, a soldier’s camouflaged legs, a peering eye from an opening in a mihrab. Four large paintings continue the passport theme, inviting the viewer to reflect on the president’s Muslim travel ban. The artist is a second-year student at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).
Helen Day opens exhibit by top master’s students, Best of Northeast opens Friday →
This year, five prolific young artists were chosen from over 150 submissions. The selections were made by Jeffrey De Blois of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Rachel Moore, executive director at the Helen Day; and Ian Alden Russell, curator at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University.
Here’s a look at the five artists.
• Arghavan Khosravi probes both personal and political experiences by integrating Persian motifs from her native Iran with imagery taken from contemporary media and popular culture that result in vibrant works on paper. Khosravi, trained as a graphic designer, is a second-year student at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.
Muslim Ban Made Personal →
Iranian graduate student Arghavan Khosravi MFA 18 PT had just returned to Providence from a trip home when President Trump’s executive order blocking Muslim refugees and foreign nationals from entering or re-entering the US went into effect on January 27. Deeply disturbed by the news, she responded by digging out her expired passports and spontaneously turning them into art. “It seems I won’t need my passport anymore,” she declared in an Instagram post, “so I started painting on it.
18 Female Artists on Their Favorite Female Artists →
“When I first saw Tala Madani’s paintings in person, it wasn’t only seeing paintings of a successful Iranian woman that excited me, it was the complexity in meaning. The way each painting can be read from different perspectives leads the audience to experience a dissonance in interpreting her work. Her loosely applied brushstrokes portray often cartoonish characters, which may not initially seem to be a sophisticated style to convey such complicated concepts.