Golnar Adili - Witt Visiting Artist
We are super excited to welcome Brooklyn-based Iranian-American artist Golnar Adili to Stamps School this week as a Witt Visiting Artist. Golnar will present a public lecture on her work on Thursday, March 14 at 2:00pm at Stamps Printmedia Studios, room 2147. During her residency at Stamps, Adili will also produce a limited edition laser-engraving print in collaboration with Nick Dowgwillo and students.
Born in Virginia, Golnar Adili moved to Iran when she was four. Adili holds a Master's degree in architecture from the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, where she received the Thesis Award and was the recipient of the Booth Traveling Fellowship to Tehran. Adili has attended residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation for the Arts, Smack Mellon, the Fine Arts Work Center Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation for the Arts, Lower East Side Printshop, Guttenberg Arts, the Center for Book Arts and Women’s Studio Workshop among others.
Adili has exhibited at Nurture Art, Brooklyn, Craft and Folk Art Museum LA, Cue Art Foundation, International Print Center NY, Brooklyn Arts Council, and the Lower East Side Printshop. She has received grants and fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Artists Books, Puffin Foundation Grant, and the Urban Artist Initiative grant. She is currently a Workspace resident at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
As an Iranian growing up in post-1979 Tehran, Adili states that: I have experienced separation, uprooting, and longing in its different manifestations. In my art, I am compelled to decode the ways in which these events have marked me through Persian poetry, craft, and the body. Art is my key to understanding the current underlying my identity and the world through fragments and abstraction. In doing so, I derive much of my inspiration from my own life.
Working in a range of media, Golnar’s process involves deconstructing and reconstructing an image or object through obsessive folding, mixing and material manipulation of fragments. Some of Golnar’s inspiration stems from Persian poetry and biographical text investigating a landscape of longing. The body becomes the context for this displacement formally and materially. In the photographic based works the photo paper is made tactile through repetitive cutting, weaving and sewing. This craft-intense way of making mimics a digital process, which creates a juxtaposition in exploring new distortions and blurring the lines between design, craft and fine art.
