About

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Maryam Adib is a figurative painter whose art practice centers dreams and memory, to explore links between our histories and lineages, examining how they affect our subconscious and shared memory.  Her work also examines our relationship to the natural world, viewing plants as our first ancestors and drawing inspiration from the lessons and knowledge they pass down to us.  

Maryam creates magical realist imagery of figures, portraits and plants that seem to both appear and disappear. She uses this visual language to convey her distant and ephemeral relationship with memory, contrasting that to her vivid and ever growing relationship to dream worlds.  The spaces left blank in the portraits and figures represent the space of what lies in between the gaps of memory and consciousness and symbolizes the ambiguity of time.  In her work, she seeks to strengthen the relationship between fantasy and reality, blurring the lines between what's real and what’s  imagined. 

She highlights the fantastical nature of dreams and their connection to everyday life, old memories, experiences, and the divine wisdom inherited from ancestral paths of connection. She often layers the figures and portraits she paints to illustrate the layers of our consciousness and our access to it through dream exploration, memory and the examination of history.   Her work is inspired by Black traditions of storytelling, folklore, dreams, and fantasy within Black American history and the broader diaspora- combining these elements  to tell new versions of old stories.

BIO:

Born in Oceanside, California in 1995 and raised in upstate New York, Maryam Adib is an oil painter, clothing designer and muralist currently working in Ithaca, NY. 

Maryam graduated with her BFA from SUNY Cortland in 2020 after completing her thesis show, Alchemy of the Spirit.  After graduating, Maryam developed a solo show in partnership with the Stage One Gallery and community organizer Jammella Anderson. There, she presented a body of work titled, Dream State: Between the Conscious and Subconscious Mind, consisting of a series of 9 paintings and a site specific mural. In recent years Maryam has had group exhibitions at Albany Center Gallery (Albany, NY), Collective Effort (Troy, NY), The Community School of Music and Art Gallery (Ithaca, NY), The National Afro- American Museum (Wilberforce, OH) and Field Projects Gallery (NYC, NY). Maryam was invited for a solo show with The Rest Gallery in Ithaca, NY, titled, The Body Remembers in early 2023. 

Maryam has received awards such as the Christine M. Miles award, the Mona Brickman Artist of the Year award and the Ceatives Rebuild New York grant. Maryam has attended residencies such as Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and the Stage One Gallery BIPOC residency. Most recently this fall/ winter season she attended three residencies, including;  Vermont Studio Center full fellowship,  Monson Arts award and the studios at Mass Moca residency full fellowship, as she develops a new body of work.