UIC Gallery 400 40th anniversary

In 1511 east, zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o’neal utilizes her grandfather’s architectural designs, most of which were never actualized, as a catalyst and entry point into thinking more deeply about space as a place for love, leisure, and dreaming. It regards the past, present, and future of Black life specific to her family and the South Side of Chicago. This project also questions the use of design, access to space, and “suitable” housing, on how it impacts one’s ability to feel a sense of belonging among complicated and nuanced feelings about “family”. The additional images layered over the architectural designs are photos she’s taken at locations relevant to her family histories on the South Side, family portraiture, and site-specific documentation.

The artist attended UIC’s art history program.

zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o’neal works to further understand how the specificity of her own lived experiences are connected to historical and contemporary movements involving embodied knowledge production. She explores this through social portraiture, video assemblage, collage, drawing, and found images. She seeks to reinforce a different kind of gaze (and gazing) which she processes through empathy, desire, love, queer identity, family, intimacy, illegibility, and poetics. Within her projects, there's an overlying theme of trying to make sense of what and who she belongs to across time, location, and space.