Sama Alshaibi: Generation After Generation

Venue: Phoenix Art Museum

Start Time: 10:00am

Non Event Dates: Closed every Monday and Tuesday

Info:

Wed. | 10a – 9p
Thurs./Sun. | 10a – 5p
Pay-What-You-Wish Wed. | 3 – 9p
First Friday | 3 – 9 p

Sama Alshaibi is the recipient of the 2021 Arlene and Morton Scult Artist Award.

Her solo exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum — on view through May 14, 2023 — showcases her latest projects of photographic imagery, video, and installation, which link themes of dispossession, mobility, peripheries, refuge, ecological entropy, and future and historical imaginings.

Sept. 28, Scult Award Lecture: Sama Alshaibi, 6:30-7:30p

This artist talk is free of museum members; $5 for general public. Register Here (bottom of page)

Alshaibi’s practice interrogates the social codes found in images, texts, and artifacts to question the construction of history and its impact on a speculative future. Shaped by photography’s historic and outsized role in generating the gendered and flattened representations of Middle Eastern and North African people and their spaces, Alshaibi reframes this legacy by presenting the Arab female figure as a complex site that embodies the physical and psychic realms of the individual and community when resources, land, mobility, and political agency are compromised. She activates her own body as a mobile medium in consideration of those who are violated and uprooted into physical and psychological exile or positioned as unwanted, alien, silenced, and disappeared. Her sculptural objects and installations apply spatial voids to evoke the body’s absence, serving as counter-memorials to war, forced migrations, and diaspora.

Alshaibi, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, was named a Regents Professor for the University of Arizona School of Art by the Arizona Board of Regents this past year.

“Sama Alshaibi: Generation After Generation” is part of the Arizona Arts Signature Series, a curated set of events and experiences this fall highlighting the amazing work being done across the division at the University of Arizona. #ArizonaArtsSeries

Sama Alshaibi, *Water Bearer II*, 2019. Photogravure print and blind embossing with transparent ink relief rolled on Stonehenge white 100% rag paper. (Right) Sama Alshaibi, *The Harvest*, 2019. Albumen print on Somerset Satin white 100% rag. Images courtesy of the artist.

About the Arlene and Morton Scult Artist Award

The Arlene and Morton Scult Artist Award recognizes a mid-career Arizona artist. Each year, the recipient is chosen from a pool of candidates based on a number of criteria. Eligible candidates are artists who demonstrate artistic excellence through their work; are presently making and exhibiting new work; have demonstrated significant growth in their work over their careers; and have been residents of Arizona for a minimum of four consecutive years. The recipient is then selected based on the work they are currently producing, in addition to pieces they have created in the past. The award includes a monetary prize to support the creation of new work, as well as a solo exhibition at the Museum the following year.