About

My practice positions immersive art as a conduit to make tangible regenerative encounters with the earth. I confront the ‘nature gap’ experienced in marginalized communities: the effects of (dis)connection with the earth. My current work rests at the intersection of contested land, eco-therapy, and personal narrative. Employing eco-therapeutic principles in service of community healing, my installations create an eco-art-therapy fusion. I engage themes of displacement and renewal, communal healing, and above all: the sublime, restorative potential of nature. Sacred Geometry fused with and revealed in natural recurring patterns—earthly, human, celestial—expose cosmic interconnectedness. Broken parts, reformed literally and spiritually, create new unified wholes, transcending into higher states of being, connecting with the spiritual energies within us and in the cosmos.

As an immigrant I act as a facilitator in my adopted home, illuminating profound connections among communities across cultures and seemingly disparate communities displaced globally. Asking how we might relate to the land outside colonial, capitalist modes of living—a future of belonging with the earth, outside territorial possession, or land extraction, but in mutual care. My work builds on years of engagement with the natural world. My installations draw on my transnational artistic roots to offer regenerative spaces, transcending boundaries of culture and place.

Patterns rooted in Sacred Geometric theory and Islamic art fuse with the earth’s recurring forms, exposing the universal oneness underlying our existence. Countering the social and environmental upheaval that shapes our current landscape, my aesthetic sanctuaries provide sites for wonder, meditation, and peace. My work employs eco-therapeutic principles in service of community healing, engaging immersive experiences to forge restorative encounters with the land(scapes) of daily life. Recognizing that materials serve as repositories, concealing and preserving our history, I seek to create otherworldly spaces where time stands still and viewers are immersed in the rhythms of creation.

My interests in metaphysical cosmology, the spiritual within the material, and earth-centered healing has given rise to an interest in ritual practice tied to place. How can sacred ritual manifest embodied healing? How can art facilitate connection with our spiritual selves? I am especially interested in studying spiritual meanings associated with vernacular landscapes. Landscape as a concept writ large: physical, cultural, historical, personal. Moving through a landscape, one might discover the memories and energies embodied in animate and inanimate forms.

I investigate cosmic interconnectedness, through an exploration of sacred geometries both in the Islamic geometric patterns and the recurring patterns in the human body, the natural world, and cosmos. Melding biomorphic pattern from the natural world with geometric abstractions, extracting the basic building blocks of pattern from natural world and cosmos recalling Islamic art making traditions. This juxtaposition illuminates the universal oneness that underlies our existence. I probe the overlap between organic and graphic patterns much as I critically examined the overlap of identities endemic to my immigrant experience.

Themes of displacement, identity and belonging, renewal and resurrection, cosmic interconnectedness illuminated through Sacred Geometry and recurring patterns in nature, human body, and cosmos, spirituality and healing with nature, and reforming broken parts into new cosmologies, lie at the heart of my practice. I seek to merge acknowledgement of trauma with the faith and hope that a future can be rebuilt on the ruins of the past.

My 2020 installation, Cosmic Veils positioned the body of the viewer as a living support for patterns of shifting color and cast shadow filtered through intricate latticework, evoking celestial forms. In my work, nature offers an escape from the world’s seething chaos and uncertainty. The American Dream (2021) was housed in Tulsa’s Oxley Nature Center. Installations of fabric marigolds at six discrete sites across the nature preserve, transfigured the space into natural shrines. The visit to each station through the forest embedded a walking meditation into the experience of viewership, implicitly inviting visitors to ‘forest bathe’ as a means of grappling with the violence of Tulsa’s 1921 Race Massacre. My 2022 Stories from the Core partnered with Oklahoma Public Libraries to bear witness to both the grief and the healing potential of the earth. Meditative prompts were paired with digitally altered photographs of Oklahoma’s extraordinary landscape to invite reflection. Printed on ‘art cards’ for visitors to take, Stories… thus expanded the artwork’s reach beyond traditional audiences.

Author Amy Rosenblum-Martín likens my emphasis on communal healing in at-risk communities to Audre Lorde’s assertion that “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” My art evolves from personal experience of healing from trauma and resurrecting life from the wreckage of the past. It embraces the notion that prioritizing self-care among people from socially suppressed populations is a radical act.

Sarah Ahmad

Bio

Ahmad’s artwork has been featured in solo and group exhibitions worldwide, from Tulsa’s Gilcrease Museum to Sharjah Museum of Art and the 1x1Art Gallery in UAE; the Asia Triennial in Manchester, UK; “Creativity in Quarantine: Women of the Pandemic,” in Washington, D.C. and Doha, Qatar; the Irving Center of Arts, the LuminArte Gallery and the Eisenman Center in Dallas; the Koel Gallery in Karachi and Rohtas 2 Gallery in Lahore, Pakistan; the Delhi Contemporary Art Week, India; the Aicon Art Gallery Viewing Room in New York City; the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center and the Gaylord Pickens Museum in Oklahoma City; the Ahha Hardesty Arts Center and the University of Tulsa’s Alexandre Hogue Gallery in Tulsa,OK; the Forest Heritage Center Museum and the the Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center in OK; the Tennessee Arts Commission Gallery in Nashville; Harvester Arts Center in Wichita, KS; ADC Fine Art in Cincinnati, OH; The Gallery at Watershed in Eugene, OR; the Yeiser Arts Center in Paducah, KY; the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art among others.

Ahmad’s public art projects were sponsored by the Regional One Hospital in Memphis; the Greenwood Art Project in Tulsa that was sponsored by the Bloomberg Philanthropies, the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the City of Tulsa; the Metro Nashville Arts Commission; and the Tennessee Arts Commission.

Sarah Ahmad has been interviewed by PBS News Hour, National Public Radio, the NPR station KWGS in Tulsa and KGOU in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Documentaries about her work are available on Google Arts and Culture, and in Emmy Award winning Gallery America’s episodes. She has been featured on the cover of OETA’s Odyssey magazine. Ahmad’s work has been reviewed in publications including Southwest Contemporary, ARTnews, and Gulf News. Her artwork has been featured in Bomb, Artnet News, USA Today, American Alliance of Museums, and Shahzad Bashir’s groundbreaking A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures [MIT, 2022]. Ahmad has given myriad artists talks, for example at Crowe Museum of Asian Art in Dallas and as an invited panelist at the 2022 South Asian Literature & Art Festival, Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, CA.

She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Andy Warhol Foundation’ Thrive Grant, grants from the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition, the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center. Fellowship, Virginia Center of Creative Arts Fellowship and BIPOC award from the Santa Fe Art Institute. She was selected for residencies at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the Paducah Arts Alliance, Santa Fe Art Institute, and the Otis College of Art and Design. In addition, Ahmad was a resident Tulsa Artist Fellow from 2019-2023.

Ahmad earned an MFA from the Memphis College of Art; an MA in Education from Union University; and a BA in Fine Arts from the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan.

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