Rajaa Gharbi, Selected Works: Exhibition by Rajaa Gharbi

VISUAL ART Every Thursday–Saturday, from November 2–December 2 12–5 pm

Featuring original acrylic paintings and prints from several previous solo exhibitions, artist Rajaa Gharbi‘s exhibition, Rajaa Gharbi, Selected Works is largely inspired by a sense of realism and the need for collective, life-nurturing visions and practices.

Gharbi’s works are never about just one or two themes. Among her earliest and indelible art influences and “training” grounds were her mother’s clothing designs, her father’s storytelling feats, her native city’s omnipresent visual worlds of hand-weaving arts, first centuries BCE monumental representational mosaic “paintings”, and the vestiges of a bygone Roman Empire. Visual storytelling and ancient scripts have held her focus since childhood. There, the first waves of infinite geometric designs and limitless color palettes permeated her psyche. Hopping around or staring at the fallen or still standing marble statues of all sizes, texts hand-engraved on steles, and very young olive trees cracking life open right through ancient fallen columns in her native Carthage, Tunisia and across North Africa are still among her sources of inspiration. She is also inhabited and taught by the geographic and human landscapes of the American Northwest.