Group Exhibitions in March 2010

"Tehran/New York"
LTMH Gallery
39 East 78th Street @Madison Avenue, 3rd Floor
NY, NY 10075
March 5-April 1 2010
Press Release

Art Dubai 2010
LTMH Gallery
March 17-20 2010

Small works on display @Chapin's Ethel Grey Stringfellow Case

I am honored to share my work this month with students at The Chapin School (New York, NY).

Iran Inside Out @the Depaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL

Exhibition Dates: September 24-November 22, 2009
Address: 2350 North Kenmore, Chicago, IL 60614
Museum Hours: M-TH 11-5; Fri 11-7; Sat-Sun 12-5.

I will participate in a panel discussion from 3-5 on September 24th, before the opening from 5-7.

For anyone who has missed this exhibition, the catalogue is available on Amazon (or via the Chelsea Art Museum) and it is also available for viewing online. It's a wonderful extension of the exhibition and features texts by the artists in their own words.

The New York Times - Article & Interactive Feature

Deborah Sontag, The Intersection of Islam, America and Identity

Close Reading of my painting "The Fall"

Upcoming Group Show at Chelsea Museum

Iran Inside Out
June 26-September 5 2009
Chelsea Art Museum
556 West 22 Street
New York, NY 10011
212.255.0719

"Persian Dolls" on view at the Austrian Cultural Forum, NY

THE SEEN AND THE HIDDEN: (DIS)COVERING THE VEIL
MAY 22 – AUG 29, 2009
Austrian Cultural Forum
11 East 52 Street (between 5th and Madison)

Curated by David Harper, Martha Kirszenbaum, and Karin Meisel

ARTISTS
Negar Ahkami (USA), Ayad Alkadhi (Iraq/USA), Zoulikha Bouabdellah (Algeria/France), Adriana Czernin (Bulgaria/Austria), Katrina Daschner (Germany/Austria), Shadi Ghadirian (Iran), Nilbar Güres (Turkey/Austria), Marlene Haring (Austria), Farheen HAQ (Canada), Princess Hijab (France), Hannah Menne (Austria), Sara Rahbar (Iran), Marjane Satrapi (France), Asma Ahmed Shikoh (Pakistan/USA), Esin Turan (Turkey/Austria)

Solo Show In March 2009

Negar Ahkami: Pride and Fall
Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller Gallery
39 East 78th Street @ Madison Avenue, 3rd Floor
New York, NY

March 4-28
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday 11 AM - 6 PM

The immigrant home rests precariously in that space in between memories of a mythical past and the chimeric dreams of possible futures. Raised by immigrant Iranian parents in America, the artist Negar Ahkami's sensibilities have been colored by this vivid, cacophonous space in between. Her artistic response is at once embracing and angry, celebratory and sardonically derisive, humorous and touchingly painful. Perhaps she has painted herself as that small, beleaguered woman on Bridge to Nowhere that links a melting Arabesque landscape across the road from a ghostlike reflective structure that stands in for the fallen WorldTradeCenter.

Over the past decade, Ahkami has been carefully honing a style that is her own. In the late 1990s, she did a series of lipstick paintings and went on to work with coffee stains, glitter, and found objects. The years of experimentation have evolved into a style now seen in a series of paintings on view at the Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller Gallery in New York City. Drawing on colors and patterns from Islamic and Orientalist art, Ahkami layers gesso and acrylic to achieve thick, almost three dimensional surfaces for her narrative paintings. "I always thought Matisse had a way of rendering his Middle Eastern or North African subjects invisible," she explains, "and a lot of my work responds to that invisibility-either subverting or replicating it."

Ahkami was born in Baltimore and grew up in New Jersey. As a child, she regularly attended art exhibits in New York City; an autograph by Keith Haring is a treasured memento of her teenage infatuation with the New York art scene. She spent summer vacations in Iran with extended family. Those leisurely family visits came to an end with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, but it was November of that year that proved to be a major turning point in her life. "Growing up," Ahkami recalls, "it felt like Iran and the US were seamlessly connected. The hostage crisis severed that. The television kept showing degrading images." The joyous place of childhood visits had now become the fixation of American news broadcasts covering the hostage crisis. Rather than turning away from the spectacle, Ahkami determined to understand it-and ultimately to explain and subvert it through her art.

The Fall, the centerpiece of the show at the Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller Gallery, is a 5 x 4 ft quixotic landscape. Drawing on techniques and imagery from Persian manuscript art, the painting demonstrates Ahkami's gift for graphic storytelling that finds inspiration and troubling fodder in both East and West. Specifically, the painting explores the inherent tension between the pride Iranians feel towards their culture and the demonized image of them that is pervasive in the media. On the panel, streams of immigrants make the treacherous journey from a fabled Iran. "The oval in the center of the painting," Ahkami explains, "is a distant, glittery, colorful fantastical world of upheaval, meltdown, and exodus." Along the way, the immigrants pass through the landscapes of illuminated manuscripts-whose infamous hunting scenes now feature naked women rather than gazelles. Perched on their exilic baggage, they watch contemporary American society whose consumerism is embedded with an Eastern topos. The figures that populate Ahkami's satirical view of American pop culture picnic on a Persian carpet, nibble Iranian caviar and sip Shiraz wine as they read 300 and newsmagazines portraying Iranians as "the other." Ahkami subverts that unspoken but pervasive narrative that Eastern immigrants leave behind places of dark repression for an always embracing and free West. In the vivid artistic vision of Negar Ahkami, nothing is ever so black and white.

- Shiva Balaghi, Ph.D., 2009

Group Exhibition in Baltimore

I'm excited to participate in this show in the city where I was born.

Exhibition in Zurich

I participated in a 2-person show with the artist Kyung Jeon at Miki Wick Kim Gallery in Zurich, Switzerland:

A Precious Passing
Negar Ahkami & Kyung Jeon
March 27 - May 10, 2008

www.mikiwickkim.com

Subway Self Portrait

One day when waiting for the subway, I realized I could take the N to the E to the G to the A to the R trains, and start and end at the subway stop near where I live in Manhattan. As a kid I would search in vain for my name, on t-shirts, magnets, tchotchke, and at the beginning of Romper Room. Finding my name in the everyday, like the subway, and experiencing the entire ride will be cause for celebration. When I ride the N-E-G-A-R loop, I will wear a matching t-shirt and serve cake.