My creative work is a playful commentary on issues regarding society, technology, and culture. I’m inspired by the middle ground where fantasy meets reality, Western and Eastern pop cultures, and my own cultural background and experiences. These inspirations are responsible for the visual language that I decide to employ in my works.

  Remixing portraiture and preconceived notions of the Black female body is at the core of my practice. By painting representations of nature and the female form with contemporary material and aesthetic choices, I subvert the one-way window of fantasy that Western painting has long offered.

  I explore narrative through painting and expanded painting, transforming the pictorial into the cinematic and scenographic. Through my artwork, which includes paintings, murals, drawings, animations, and film, I explore mythology, visual storytelling, and ethnography as mutating narratives through which we approach reality. My work composes a ludic personal mythology in which I draw from my life in Mexico City and assimilate my cultural heritage through the experience of living in contemporary Chicago.

  I am interested in examining and reimagining our relationship to our racial identities through healing our collective understanding of belonging and what it means to be family. My life-size oil paintings use the figure and portraiture to explore issues of multiculturalism, identity, representation, and race. I investigate these through use of the personal, often sharing the images and stories of family, friends, and community members to reflect the subtle and not-so-subtle integrations of these ideas into individual lives and identities.

 I immigrated to the United States from Lebanon with my family at age nineteen. Lebanon is a country that has seen conflict, violence, and war within my lifetime. I depict personal experiences related to my identity, belonging, and immigration as a Muslim female in the United States. Muslims are often seen as terrorists in the US media and have been marginalized since 9/11. The rise of white nationalism within the current global political climate has made it more dif cult to identify as a Muslim and a new immigrant.

  My work is a documentation of what I want to say and what I’m afraid to admit. Through various experiences, I nd consistent heartbreaks. These paintings began as an aversion to pleasure— I did not recognize myself. They are reflections of abandonment that stare and blink back at me; it was a full-body itch I could not reach. Now, I am trying to catch up after losing my place. Now, it’s hard to look you in the eye after you’ve seen the work.

 Ricardo Partida’s work largely critiques and illuminates depictions of gender and desire in the Western art canon. Using the visual language of the figura serpentinata, his works exalt alter egos that question conventional power structures while obscuring artist and subject. Through the use of surface treatments and mark-making, and by hybridizing lines and proportions previously associated with a gendered painting language, Partida creates surrogacies of seduction that explore carnal desires through a push-and-pull of menace and allure.

The primary source of inspiration for me is the current repression of women throughout patriarchal societies. Growing up, I gradually recognized how women do not benefit from the same opportunities as men in their everyday lives. Having consistently observed how many facets of society are established to favor men over women, I questioned how my life would differ if none of these boundaries existed. My work depicts scenes that women would be typically excluded from, even though it’s entirely normal for men to be doing such things—drinking, picnicking, swimming, celebrating freedom.

My work—satirical drawings, comics, and textiles—is woven from elaborate, humorous, and politically pointed narratives that expose the experiences with sexism that women have faced throughout history and continue to face every day. Primarily, I have been using carpet to create figurative works that visually mimic latch hook rugs, yet deviate from the medium’s traditional subject matter, depiction style, and scale.