18 December 2008

Young Muslims Make Their Mark: Artist Heba Amin

Heba Amin

This article is excerpted from the richly illustrated book Being Muslim in America, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. The entire book is available in PDF format.

The contemporary artist Heba Amin, 28, has been drawing for as long as she can remember, but pursuing art full-time did not occur to her until she was a junior in college. At the time, Amin, who now lives in Minneapolis, was a math major and first envisioned herself as an architect.

Amin was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt. Her late father was an interior designer; her mother, an administrative worker at the private American school Amin attended from kindergarten through 12th grade.

After high school, Amin traveled to the United States to attend Macalester College, a private, liberal arts school in St. Paul, Minnesota. By her third year, Amin realized that her heart lay in art, not math, and in 2002 she earned a bachelor’s degree in studio art, with a concentration in oil painting.

Living in the United States, she told Fayeq Oweis, editor of the Encyclopedia of Arab American Artists, allowed her “to take the role of the outside observer” and opened her eyes to the richness of Arab and Egyptian culture that she had “previously overlooked or taken for granted.”

For several years, Amin’s work revolved around portraits of Bedouin women, who, she said, “are known for their embroidered and beaded crafts.

The European Union had a program designed to preserve these crafts, funding the work and encouraging older women to teach younger ones. I became interested in that and stayed with different tribes to see the process working. I also apprenticed with a Bedouin artist who created sand paintings.

As Amin spent time with different Bedouin tribes, she realized she was even more interested in their way of life than their craft.

“I was struck by how attached they were to their surroundings and the land, and how sad it was that their culture was deteriorating due to urban sprawl and modernization,” she recalled.

Installation piece Root Shock by Heba Amin

Amin began painting brightly colored portraits of Bedouin women juxtaposed with urban geometric patterns. “The patterns overwhelm the paintings, representing how the city is taking over the Bedouin culture,” she said.

Eventually, Amin’s Bedouin paintings led her in a different artistic direction, toward three-dimensional installation pieces. “As I did the portraits, I found I was really interested in the city structure format,” she explained.

The next time she was in Cairo, Amin said, “I noticed how many abandoned structures there were — expansive masses of land were covered with unfinished buildings. I took photos of these structures, and then started doing a series of works about them, investigating them. What they were, why they were abandoned, their effect on people.”

Amin became fascinated with the thought of the city as an emotional idea, rather than a structural one, and that led her to a different medium.

“I found that painting was a little restrictive — I couldn’t really relay the emotion I was after,” she said. “I wanted to move into something that was more experiential. Installation art allowed me to create a space that expressed the emotional ideas I was after.”

Amin’s work has been shown at a number of galleries in Minneapolis, New York, and Washington.

“I look at city infrastructure as representation of the progression of a society,” she wrote on her Web site. “Urban planning is indicative of a society’s political situation, and I am interested in investigating Middle Eastern cities where the infrastructure is an obstacle and a burden to people’s daily lives. I am interested in the city’s effect on personal space, where city structure begins to take precedence over individuality and where buildings and humans begin to overlap and layer on top of one another instead of coexisting.

“These installations are simply intended to address the idea that one’s surroundings play an immense role in behavior,” she wrote.

In addition to her installations, Amin recently illustrated a book that profiles Muslim women in history called Extraordinary Women from the Muslim World.

In spite of her artistic success, Amin is reluctant to depend on her art for her living. “I’m not focused on selling my work,” she said. “And that frees me from the obligation of making work that other people want. I’ve been in school now for 10 years, and ultimately, I’d like to stay in academia.”

As for living in the United States, she said, “I love it. I love being in the academic environment, where I have time to explore my ideas and how to express them.”