Maryam Adib

Maryam graduated with her BFA from SUNY Cortland in May of 2020 after completing her thesis show, Alchemy of the Spirit.  After graduating, Maryam was invited to develop a solo show in Albany NY in early 2021. This opportunity was presented by the Stage One Gallery BIPOC residency program run by community organizer, Jammella Anderson and the Stage One Gallery.  In this time, she created the body of work, Dream State: Between the Conscious and Subconscious Mind. This was a series of 9 paintings and a site specific mural in the Stage One Gallery. Since then, Maryam  has been a part of various group shows in Albany such as SEEN and the Mohawk- Hudson Regional show, both curated by the Albany Center Gallery. Along with the group show, Mixtape Vol. 1 curated by Collective Effort in Troy, NY. She was awarded the Christine M. Miles Award in May of 2021 and later received the Mona Brickman Artist of the Year award in December of 2021, both presented by Albany Center Gallery. Shortly after, Maryam attended the Saltonstall foundation for the Arts in August of 2022 for a 4 week residency.  In that time she created various drawings and began developing a large scale 5 panel painting. Maryam was then invited for a solo show with The Rest Gallery in Ithaca, NY, titled, The Body Remembers in early 2023. Over the course of the last two years, beginning in July of 2022, she and a group of artists working with Southside Community Center’s program CUMEP (Community Unity Music Education Program) were awarded the Creatives Rebuild New York grant.  This grant provides each artist on the team with a stipend to work for said program, while also working on their own personal practice. She has been responsible for developing art programming centered around Black and Brown youth in Ithaca.  Her professional focus being both mural and screen- printing education and development.  With the first year of the grant work, Maryam has developed and screen-printed designs to promote the program (CUMEP), created art curriculum, and developed a kids mural program where children learn how to design and paint a community mural.  

Maryam Adib is a figurative painter whose art practice centers dreams and memory, to explore links between our histories and lineages and 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 technique to convey her distant and ephemeral relationship with memory.  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 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.  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.

NY

United States