Join us for Breaking the Frame, an exhibition showcasing four immigrant, refugee, and diasporic artists expanding our understanding of time, identity, perspective, and tradition. Through mixed media, collage, and the rupturing of frames and borders, these artists pose questions about the ways we understand our relationship to race, gender, belonging, history, and culture.
EXHIBITION DATES
August 4 – September 15, 2023
EVENTS
Opening Reception: Friday, August 4 from 6 – 8 PM
Artists’ Talk: Friday, September 8 from 6 – 8 PM
Dalar Alahverdi is a contemporary visual artist of Armenian descent working and living in California. Growing up in Iran, as a woman in a minority group, Dalar understood the value of social justice. Throughout her life, she has been fascinated by discovering the untold stories of people. She continues to explore the overlooked elements of daily life through social, cultural, and political lenses. Her paintings are metaphoric; the first thing you see is not the story she wants to tell. Her works often represent social justice and human rights. Dalar received her BA in Painting from Tehran University, and an MA in Painting from Yerevan State Academy of Fine Arts and a second MA in Art Education from California State University, Long Beach. She has participated in numerous exhibitions in museums and galleries abroad and in the United States. Dalar has also collaborated on several scenic designs for the theater in Iran. She currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and teaches art at the Children’s Museum in Oakland and other studios in the East Bay.
Nimisha Doongarwal is an Indian immigrant and a sociopolitical artist who moved to the US in 2007 to pursue a higher education in science. Her mom was an artist, and for years she learned to paint and draw by copying her mother’s paintings. Eventually becoming an engineer, in 2014 she decided to study art history and art psychology at Stanford University, followed by an MFA from the Academy of Arts University. Nimisha’s works are inspired by her surroundings and her finding her own identity as a global citizen. She brings her ancestry and culture into her work to showcase the rich South Asian heritage. Her work has been featured in publications and magazines including Forbes, Maake magazine, and Artmarket magazine. She has exhibited in museums and galleries including the DeYoung Museum, San Francisco International Airport, Gallery RouteOne, UCSF Women’s Hospital, San Mateo City Hall, San Mateo Library, Museum of Northern California, and Brown University.
Forrest McGarvey is an artist and writer currently residing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Through digital collage, video, installation, and works on paper, his practice explores how we orient oneself within a contemporary media landscape. Seeing the digital screen as a space that lacks definition, his practice examines how our established understandings of perception are being challenged and altered via our relationship with technology, both on and offline. Drawing from a plethora of sources—cultural and historical, personal and stereotypical, fantasy and commercial—he creates narrative works about identity, queerness, embodiment, and failure that arise at the intersection of all these cross-roads, and the potentiality of these combinations therein.
Born in Jaipur Rajasthan, the Pink City of India, Sujata Tibrewala inherited her love for art from her maternal grandmother. In 2008, she gave up her engineering career for this first love. Founder President of the Indian American Artist’s Association (IAAA), Sujata is a multi-talented award winning artist having exhibited her work at various prestigious venues in the United States and India and featured at National Museum of American History, Broadway New York and awardee from Lalit Kala Academy, UP , India. Currently a docent at San Jose Museum of Art, she has served as a docent and adult art education advisor at Brooks’ Museum in Memphis, TN, and teaches art to students of all ages at her studio at River Island , CA. She is a member of the North California Caucus of Arts, Women Eco Artists Dialogue and has been part of St. Louis Artists’ Guild, Chesterfield Arts, Art world Assoc., Women’s Caucus for the Arts, MySLART and Art World Assoc. Her work has also been shown at CCT Gallery, Life Force Arts Center & University of IL, Circle Campus in Chicago and Regional Commission of Arts St Louis, MO. Her work has been shown in galleries in Bangalore, India, London, and New Delhi, India.
