October 17, 2020 – January 3, 2021
Project Room
A Deep Feeling includes three recent video works by Chicago based visual artist, educator, and independent curator, Zakkiyyah Najeebah Dumas-O’neal. All three works celebrate Black womanhood, connecting the past to our present moment — with the complexities and beauty that entails.
Zakkiyyah Najeebah Dumas-O’neal’s (American, born 1991) work is most often initiated by personal and social histories related to family legacy, queerness, community making, intimacy, and Audre Lorde’s naming of “the erotic”. Najeebah’s practice borrows from the visual traditions of social portraiture, video assemblage, collage, and found images, and seeks to reinforce a different kind of gaze (and gazing) enacted through empathy, desire, love, connectedness, and longing. Najeebah makes work to further understand how her own lived experiences are connected to broader shared histories and social/cultural experiences.
Najeebah has been included in numerous group exhibitions and has had several solo exhibitions. She has also curated exhibitions at spaces such as Chicago Art Department, Blanc Gallery and Washington Park Arts Incubator at the University of Chicago. She currently holds the 2019–2020 Jackman Goldwasser Residency at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago. Najeebah is also a co-founder of CBIM (Concerned Black Image Makers): a collective driven project that prioritizes shared experiences and concerns by lens-based artists of the Black diaspora.
You can learn more about Najeebah and her work at zakkiyyahnajeebah.com.
Images: (above) Zakkiyyah Najeebah Dumas-O’neal, still image from DE(LIBERATE), 2017, one channel video, 10 minutes and 35 seconds; (below) Zakkiyyah Najeebah Dumas-O’neal, still image from A Deep Feeling, 2019, one channel video, 3 minutes and 28 seconds
