Umar Rashid on Henry Taylor: B Side

MOCA members at the Contributing level and above are invited to a walkthrough ofHenry Taylor: B Sideled by artist Umar Rashid. Rashid employs writing, illustration, painting, and sculpture to construct alternative historical narratives. Guiding a tour through a selection of the works on view,Rashid willshare reflections drawing on his own artistic practice.An invitation with event details will be emailed to members at the Contributing level ($200) and above. Memberships can be purchased or renewed online. If you would like to upgrade an existing membership, please contact the Membership Department at membership@moca.org.



About Umar RashidUmar Rashid (also known as Frohawk Two Feathers) is a natural storyteller. He employs writing, illustration, painting, and sculpture to construct alternative historical narratives that reference a panoply of cultures, collapsing geography and time. At the core of his practice is a reimagining of romantic history painting and eighteenth-century colonial scenes. Rashid steers clear of simplistic dichotomies, challenging the viewer with a complex iconographic language of arcane classifying systems, maps, and cosmological diagrams. His work is informed by recognizable cultural references, whether historical materials such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, ledger art, Persian miniature painting, and illustrated Spanish colonial manuscripts or more contemporary phenomena such as the hip-hop era of the 1980s and 1990s. Alongside these identifiable sources—often regarded as “truth”—are unseen, fantastical stories, with Rashid taking on the role of what one might call a fabulist. His painterly tales complicate the idea of what is true and false, prompting us to consider whether the “truths” that we are taught may in fact be lies