Zahra Marwan just spent a month at the Maurice Sendak Foundation in Connecticut, one of four artists nominated for the fellowship each year. She slept on a farm with three other illustrators and worked in a little black house in the woods, nine to six, with archive sessions twice a week. "Each one felt like a picture book story," she says of the studios. By the end she'd made six of the larger paintings in her new show at Hecho a Mano.
That show, Is There a Horse on Your Roof?, opens July 3. The title comes from Maurice Sendak's debut picture book, Kenny's Window, but Zahra first heard the idea from her friend Andres, who grew up wondering if there was a lion on his roof in northern New Mexico. "It feels like the magic that comes from connecting with people and hearing what they have to say," she says, "and the disbelief of what's happening at the same time could be as strange as having a horse on your roof."
The disbelief is real and current. Zahra is Kuwaiti-born, and the show negotiates the experience of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and its reach into her family. "One thousand attacks on my little country in six weeks," she writes in the show text. "It felt like I was speaking nonsense to strangers in my agitation." On the podcast she talks about calling home while Kuwait was attacked again, and about an uncle who made so many light comments that she got off the phone feeling bold and comfortable in a dangerous situation. "These people, my family, they make me feel really confident," she says, "just from the way they interpret them."
There's a resilience she keeps circling back to. Her Kuwaiti publisher was deported in the fall, and when they finally spoke, he told her they hadn't broken his spirit. "How is it that Arabs are like this?" she says. "They're like, I'm not broken. No, you haven't done it." She and Kara land on the idea that laughter can be a nurtured choice passed down through generations, chosen over violence, chosen as the release. As Zahra puts it: "I hear the sirens and go to sleep."
Ask her whether the words or the paintings come first and she'll tell you they co-arise. "An idea comes from always what was lived, and then how it's written, and then what that looks like, or how that feels, and then refining it." A painting translates the text, or the text translates the painting, and maybe that's why they work together. Frank points out that her paintings are almost literal, so specific to a real experience and a felt feeling that they end up reading as surreal.
Her paintings are tender and jewel-like, offering grounding and respite from the grief. They're populated by the people and places of her own life and open enough to invite you into moments of beauty and connection in your own. "What sustains me, and continued to sustain me during the war," she says in the show text, "are loving relations. The quiet moments with people. I acclimate to beauty among the grief."