Real Feel
on view September 5 – October 7, 2023
Morgan Lehman Gallery
526 West 26th Street, Suite 410
New York, NY 10001

I am very happy to be showing a series of new paintings at Morgan Lehman Gallery this fall. The paintings are all from this year, and the result of an intense hermit mode of studio time while listening to Sufi lectures.

“In making the paintings on display, the artist was drawn to the idea of a “welcoming void”. In each composition, Elsayed arranges colored forms to emphasize a sense of entry and openness. The images imply pictorial depth despite their ostensible formal flatness, and in this way invite the viewer into and through the space. It’s also no coincidence that some works feel flag-like, pointing us further toward a conception of place and country.”

New Installation at the Ford Foundation Galleries

Center For No Center: A Reading Room
on view September 7 – December 9, 2023

Ford Foundation Gallery
320 E 43rd St, New York, NY 10017
Opening Thursday Sept. 7, 6-8pm
Curator Led Gallery Tour Friday Sept. 8,  12 – 1pm

Collaboration with Andrew Demirjian for the exhibit What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI curated by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Meldia Yesayan.

Invoking the various meanings of “modeling,” the exhibition assembles the work of artists who map the limits of our current algorithmic imaginaries and move beyond them in acts of critical world building. Modifying a line from feminist technoscience scholar, Donna Haraway—“It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories”— the exhibition’s title reflects the featured artists’ interest in speculative worlding and in reimagining algorithmic systems.

Algorithmic worldmaking often unfolds in a “black box”––an opaque space of automated decision-making whose rationale is hidden from public view. The featured artists open up the black box for scrutiny, imagining possibilities for feminist, antiracist, and decolonial AI.

Parallel Incantations at New York City Penn Station through September 19, 2022

Art at Amtrak is a year-round public art initiative that brings compelling visual works to those who pass through New York Penn Station each day. Read more about it here on Hyperallergic.

Dahlia Elsayed’s vibrant work for Art at Amtrak, “Parallel Incantations,” surrounds the Penn Station waiting area with an illusion of infinite space. It pulls inspiration from ancient Egyptian temples and Islamic architecture, transforming the space with suggestions of expansiveness, air, and ambient light. As it evokes pilgrimage and ritual, this site-specific installation provides a poetic connection to a sense of deep time and travel.

Elsayed says, “For this project, I wanted to make a visual poem for a waiting area—the space between coming and going, and to create a place within a physical transportation hub for viewers to be transported sensorially. ”

Converging Lines: Tracing the Artistic Lineage of the Arab Diaspora in the U.S.
Curated by Maymanah Farhat. On view September 10 – November 17, 2021
Middle East Institute
1763 N St. NW, Washington D.C. 20036

Artists belonging to the Arab Diaspora in the United States have contributed to the development of American art since the early twentieth century, yet the story of this artistic community has rarely been considered. Converging Lines: Tracing the Artistic Lineage of the Arab Diaspora in the U.S. seeks to unearth this history by identifying some of the aesthetic threads that connect a diverse, multigenerational group of artists, thus offering a template for future scholarship.

One of the most prominent themes explored by Arab American and U.S based Arab artists over the last seventy-five years has been the process of migration and the state of in-betweenness that often results. Beginning with the work of Kahlil Gibran, a member of the earliest known Arab American creative community, the exhibition explores how artists have used concepts like third spaces, community building, hybridity, and memory formation in works that allude to the complexities of migration, including invisibility, alienation, intergenerational trauma, and changing identities.

Featured artists are Etel Adnan, Sama Alshaibi, Zeina Barakeh, Kamal Boullata, Huguette Caland, Yasmine Nasser Diaz, Dahlia Elsayed, Kahlil Gibran, Sherin Guirguis, Helen Khal, John Halaka, Jackie Milad, Mohammed Omar Khalil, Zeinab Saab, Jacqueline Reem Salloum, Nazar Yahya, and Helen Zughaib.

The Good and The True at Paul Robeson Galleries
September 1 – November 22
About: Text and images have been interconnected in art for thousands of years.  Egyptian hieroglyphics circa 3200BC were a pictorial language painted on papyrus to tell stories about society.  In the 13^th to 15^th centuries illuminated manuscripts from were made with animal skins to tell stories about religion or rulers.  Nowadays, artists use text in various forms (printed, calligraphic and pictorial forms), to make works which communicate their ideas about the world.  Language and aesthetic properties are in dialogue with one another, refuting or reinforcing, the message(s) of the work.

Chart Towards the Charms is on view June 5-Sept 13 at Pier 1, 70th St & Hudson River Walk in Riverside Park. Part of Re:Growth curated by Karin Bravin

The exhibition features over 20 site specific artist projects, read more about my project and others at this wonderful NY Times review of the show by Hilarie M. Sheets.

Review in Sculpture Magazine, Nov/Dec 2020 issue
Written by Sarah Tanguy
A really thoughtful review of Which Yesterday Is Tomorrow? at Transformer Gallery, Washington DC

Solo Exhibition: Common Language
March 17 – April 17, 2020
Reception: March 24, 4:30 – 7:30pm
Lemmerman Gallery, NJCU
Hepburn Hall, Room 323
2039 Kennedy Blvd., Jersey City, NJ 07305

Common Language presents a series of works on paper and a site-specific ceramic installation by artist Dahlia Elsayed. Her allegorical landscapes use a symbolic vocabulary rooted in cartography, comics, and cosmology. Through Elsayed’s visual narrative, the exhibition explores the possibilities of transcultural visual communication, the potentials and limits of language, and the ways in which image and text modify each other for alternative meanings.

A large and beautiful sketchbook show at Gallery Aferro, Glimpse arose from curator Evonne M. Davis’ fascination with and love of materials that reveal the artistic process. With almost 100 national artists and collectives participating, the exhibit features a substantial, immersive range of sketches, sketchbooks, artist books, lists, musings, drawings and studies, “black books,” proof sheets, and doodles on napkins or the backs of envelopes dating from as early as the 1940s to the present day.

On view February 22- March 28, 2020
Gallery Aferro
73 Market St. Newark, NJ