In my paintings, for over a decade I have utilized Civil War–era photographs to help illustrate my exploration of contemporary issues, both personal and universal. My father’s death when I was sixteen forced me to seriously consider my mortality, which led to a long investigation into my spiritual core and what it means to be human. The work has never been specifically about the Civil War, but I have found the war’s imagery ideal for symbolic storytelling dealing with themes of courage, woundedness, home, ego, and faith.

In this series of paintings, I use the icon of the blackboard to reexamine some of what we know about a group of our most familiar historical figures, myths, and cultural phenomena. Our understanding of this should not stop at what we were told in elementary school.

The content of my recent body of work is fueled by found drawings left by museum visitors. While working as a gallery attendant, I was accustomed to finding strange, unfinished sketches left in the galleries. Abandoned and out of context, these drawings possess a sense of humor but also deep sincerity, as their makers created them while observing works of art in the museum. By reproducing these images through trompe l’oeil–style paintings, I activate a value shift. For example, children’s scribbles no longer exist as an afterthought, they’ve

As an artist who witnessed the waning of my father’s personhood through the dissolution of his memory, I wrestled with conveying the devastating personal and human experience of this loss without relying on visual clichés. The final image in my drawings is largely the result of the pentimenti that have moved the narrative along, without resolving it. Sometimes, the layers of earlier drawings overpower the last, like quicksand under a surface of marks and erasures.

Zina Haydar Al-Shukri combines materials to emphasize the topography of individual people. Her process takes into consideration the notions of transition, conflicts, and hybridity in relation to culture and religion, individuality and shared experience, psychology and social determination. Al-Shukri’s portrait practice provides a psychological “check-in” to create a space for dialogue, illustrating the relationship between the subjects and their experience of social conditions.

My paintings are landscapes from liminal, everyday spaces, usually painted with oil on canvas or panel. These scenes are typical, but in them I find immense depth, presence, and beauty. I enjoy the quickness and washiness of paint, often letting it be itself on canvas rather than worrying too much about its representation. As I paint, I focus on the idea of being present in a world that is on the verge of collapse due to climate catastrophe and economic disaster. I wonder what it means to make art in the end times.

In a landscape defined by not knowing, she’s wearing a dress (not to belong). But with a radical uncoupling of cause and effect, the spectrum is reset. Footsteps on the gravel pierce the stillness of the sleeping body—make it start. It is their function or nonfunction that distinguishes them.

For me the process of painting is a mode of thinking. Paintings should sweat, they should exist in a state of anxiety that reflects their maker.

I revel in the capacity of the hand and the automatic mark to manifest forms arrived at through an ongoing dialogue with the work itself. I search for paintings rather than executing them. My sources range from illuminated manuscripts to late modernist painting, frequencies, and airbrush techniques.

I do not linger needlessly when the conditions for discovery are lost. I retune my painting practice, and a new cycle begins.