OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

YASMINE NASSER DIAZ Born in Chicago, IL Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2021 For Your Eyes Only, NADA House, Ochi Projects, Governors Island, NY For Your Eyes Only, University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, Ann Arbor, MI

2020 solf powers, Ochi Projects, Los Angeles, CA soft powers, Arab American National Museum, Dearborn, MI

2019 Dirty Laundry, Habibi House, Detroit, MI

2018 Exit Strategies, Women’s Center for Creative Work, Los Angeles, CA

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2021 Converging Lines: Tracing the Artistic Lineage of the Arab Diaspora in the U.S, Middle East Institute, Washington, D.C. The New Contemporaries Vol 2, Residency Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2020 If Everything Was An Outrage, Track 16, Los Angeles, CA New Radicalism: The Radical New Voices from the Middle-East, North Africa and her Diasporas, ZoHo, Rotterdam, Netherlands Title TBD, Arab Amp, Pieter Space, Los Angeles, CA

2019 On Echoes of Invisible Hearts, Station Beirut, Lebanon A Manifest of Ipseities, 333 Midland, Detroit, MI A Store Show, ODD ARK, Los Angeles, CA With a Little Help From My Friends, Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA The Binder of Women, The Pit, Los Angeles, CA Singing in the Dark, Art Salon Chinatown, Los Angeles, CA Overlapping Tension, Susquehanna Art Museum, Harrisburg, PA Tell Me A Story And I’ll Sing You A Song , Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

CO/LAB 4, Torrance Art Museum, with ODD ARK Welcome Home, AALA Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2018 Familiar Friends, Durden and Ray, Los Angeles, CA On Echoes of Invisible Hearts, The Poetry Project Space, Berlin, Germany Heat Wave, Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco, CA Surrogate, Pieter Performance Space, Los Angeles, CA plants, Art in the Park, Arroyo Seco, Los Angeles, CA Radiant, Blue Roof Studios, Los Angeles, CA Good Smoke/Good Poke, 0-0 LA, Los Angeles, CA Feminism Now, Grafiska Sallskapet, Stockholm, Sweden This Is Awkward, ESMoA, El Segundo, CA Disparate Sources, Keystone Art Space, Los Angeles, CA

2017 Office Hours, The Main Museum, Los Angeles, CA Her Intuition, Brainworks Gallery, Los Angeles, CA On The Other Side: at land's edge 2017 Fellows Exhibition, Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA One Woman Shows, Pieter Space, Los Angeles, CA State of the Union, Brainworks Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Uprise, Untitled Space, New York, NY

2016 Women on the Fence, Mothership Festival, Desert Hot Springs, CA LA/Berlin, Mission Workshop, Los Angeles, CA Face Time, Maiden L.A. pop-up event in Hollywood, Los Angeles, CA Viva La Muxer, Werkatz, Los Angeles, CA

2015 Latina/o Queer Arts & Film Festival, Advocate & Gochis Galleries, Los Angeles, CA

2010 Abriendo La Boca, EntreyArte, Buenos Aires, Argentina

AWARDS & RECOGNITIONS

2020 Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant Creative Capital Award Semi-Finalist Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Emerging Artist Grant Nominee OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

2019 Puffin Foundation Project Grant for Dirty Laundry California Community Foundation, Visual Artist Fellowship Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Emerging Artist Grant Nominee

SELECTED PRESS & PUBLICATIONS

2019 Refinery29, "15 Of Our Favorite Contemporary Artists Get Real About Making It In The Art World,” Cait Munro, August 8, 2019 HyperAllergic, “Yemeni Artists Reflect on Their War-Torn Homeland,” Lizzy Vartanian Collier, April 24, 2019 Jdeed Magazine, Issue 4, “Eye on Yemeni Art,” Cynthia Jreige, 2019 Contemporary Class, “How Yemeni Artists Are Highlighting Displacement," Katie Silcox, February 2019

2018 The Billboard Magazine, “Ten Artists We Should Be Watching,” Carly Defilippo, October, 2018 ArtMejo, “On Echoes of Invisible Hearts: Narratives of Yemeni Displacement,” Tariq Shahrour, October 15, 2018 The Coastal Post, “Yasmine Diaz - Exit Strategies at The Women’s Center for Creative Work,” Alexis Alicette Bolter, July 26, 2018 Los Angeles Times, “Datebook: Shots of old Route 66, dreamlike paintings and garments fashioned from paper”, Carolina Miranda, July 12, 2018 Artillery Magazine, “Yasmine Diaz,” Annabel Osberg, July 11, 2018 Feminist Magazine Radio, (live interview) “Exit Strategies,” Lynn Harris Ballen, June 19, 2018 What Artists Listen To, (podcast) Episode 13, “Yasmine Diaz,” Pia Pack, June 12, 2018 Vogue, The Wing’s Curator Falls Asleep to Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Dreams of Rearranging Art, Carmen Rosy Hall, May 15, 2018 Feminist Crush, (podcast) Season 3, Episode 13, “Yasmine Diaz,” Kitty Lindsay, April 20, 2018

2017 Kolaj Magazine, “One Way or Another: A Profile of Yasmine Diaz,” Issue 21, Aryana Gazza Hessami Hera Collective, “Yasmine Diaz, Artist,” December 19, 2017 Art and Cake, “Brainworks Gallery Celebrates the Confidence of Her Intuition,” Genie Davis, May 29, 2017 Fabrik, “Brainworks Gallery presents ‘Her Intuition,’” April 13, 2017 OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

RESIDENCIES & FELLOWSHIPS

2020 Arab American National Museum, Dearborn, MI

2019 Vermont Studio Center; Johnson, VT Habibi’s Artist Residency, Detroit, MI

2018 Women’s Center for Creative Work, Artist in Residence, Los Angeles, CA

2017 at land's edge Fellowship, Los Angeles, CA

2010 Entre y Arte, Buenos Aires, Argentina

ARTIST TALKS, PRESENTATIONS & WORKSHOPS

2019 Paul Brach Visiting Artist Lecture, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA Policy and Paletas, California Immigrant Policy Center Guest Lecture, California State Summer School for the Arts eib), Habibi House, Detroit) بيع Let’s Talk About Artist Talk, Room Project, Detroit Feminism & Love, in conversation with Alexis Bolter, The Situation Room, Los Angeles, CA Rip Roar, Other Books, Los Angeles, CA, with Akina Cox Artist Talk, Marlborough School, Los Angeles, CA

2018 The Art of Resistance, Guest Lecturer, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA Artist Talk with Ibi Ibrahim and curator Lila Nazemian, The Poetry Project Space, Berlin Artist talk in Conversation with Samira Yamin, Women’s Center for Creative Work, Los Angeles, CA Culture Clash: panel host, discussion with Arshia Haq, Rema Ghuloum, and Gazelle Samizay Collage Artists Tackle Contemporary Issues, Kolaj Fest, New Orleans, LA Dismantling Patriarchy, Golden Thread Productions, Brava Theater Center, San Francisco, CA OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

California State University, Los Angeles, Women’s Studies Guest Speaker

2016 Headscarves and Hymens, Women’s Center for Creative Work, Los Angeles, CA OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Los Angeles-based artist Yasmine Nasser Diaz can best be described as a collagist—not only of images clipped and rearranged, but also of heritages, cities, languages, and decades. Born in Chicago to Yemeni parents, the multidisciplinary artist makes works that explore the complexities of third-culture identity. Adolescence, not only as an age but as a conceptual stage of learning, is a recurrent subject of inquiry for the artist. In her ongoing “Bedroom” series, Diaz constructs immersive bedrooms for fictional two Arab American teenage sisters. The room is filled with journals, novels, makeup, and set in what is meant to be a 1990s Midwestern home. Fabrics play a vital role in her work. Diaz has recently begun a series of fiber etchings in which she applies acidic paste to velvet fabrics. The process allows the fabric’s cellulose fibers to dissolve, while the base silk-based mesh remains intact, creating patterns of opacity and transparency. In fashion, this treatment of fabric is called devoré, and harkens to a Yemeni style of dress (known as a dir’) that is reserved for married women. Following exhibitions at the Arab American Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, and Ochi Projects in Los Angeles, Diaz recently installed her work, For Your Eyes Only, at NADA House on New York’s Governors Island (on view through August 1). We caught up with the artist at her Los Angeles studio to learn about the Instagram accounts she finds most inspiring and her impromptu studio dance parties for one.

Yasmine Nasser Diaz’s For Your Eyes Only (2021). Courtesy of the artist and Ochi Projects.

What are the most indispensable items in your studio and why? My wireless headphones and my X-Acto knives with plenty of fresh new blades on hand. Collage is at the heart of practice and I often make small, quick pieces to warm up when I get to the studio. What is the studio task on your agenda tomorrow that you are most looking forward to? OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Continuing to play with these textile collages. I love the early phase and newness of experimenting in a different direction. What kind of atmosphere do you prefer when you work? Do you listen to music or podcasts, or do you prefer silence? If I’m cleaning or reorganizing, which is an important and frequent studio ritual, I’ll listen to a podcast. If I’m in “process mode” I have about 30-plus playlists I rotate between. If I’m writing, I generally prefer total silence. What trait do you most admire in a work of art? I love seeing work that has a new or different approach to something very familiar. Sometimes it’s an unexpected use of humor or it’s a seemingly simple execution that brilliantly captures something very complex and nuanced.

Yasmine Nasser Diaz at work in the studio, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.

What trait do you most despise? Despise is a strong word… . What snack food could your studio not function without? Popcorn and tangerines. Who are your favorite artists, curators, or other thinkers to follow on social media right now? Simone Leigh’s Instagram feed is one of my favorites. There are so many other artists I could name, so I’ll just pick one. I’m a huge fan of Meriem Bennani’s animation videos. I love her use of unusual humor and fiction to explore very real and timely global events. It’s playful and smart work and often has a cheeky, mischievous quality. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Yasmine Nasser Diaz at work in the studio, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.

When you feel stuck in the studio, what do you do to get un-stuck? There is a lot of impromptu dancing that happens in my studio. I put on my headphones to spare my neighbors, crank up the music and just dance for a few minutes. It’s an instant mood changer. I also recently bought a hula hoop for the studio so that’s a new fave. When I’m especially stuck, the best thing to do is leave the studio. I’ll run errands, go for a walk, call a friend. It’s better than spinning my wheels and getting nowhere. What is the last exhibition you saw (virtual or otherwise) that made an impression on you? Hayv Kahraman’s show “The Touch of Otherness” blew me away. Her work always does! Susu Attar recently shared a very powerful collaborative multimedia work titled October Uprising Project. It beautifully fuses footage from the 2019 revolution in Baghdad against the streets of Los Angeles using projections as moving paintings. I also loved the group show “Myselves” that was at Kohn Gallery, curated by Joshua Friedman. So much great work in that show. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Music and Arts

For centuries, Yemenis have been migrating to many parts of the world—as traders, merchants or labor migrants—and at other times fleeing war and persecution.

On June 10, the Middle East Institute’s Arts and Culture Center and the Focus on the Story International Photo Festival co-hosted a panel featuring Yemeni artists to discuss “Migration in Perpetuity: Yemeni Voices from the Diaspora.” OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Thana Faroq, presently based in the Netherlands, was born and raised in Yemen, where she developed her passion for photography. “Holding the camera was an act of empowerment,” she said. “I concentrated on documenting the displacement in Yemen through the point of view of women, children and girls. I wanted to photograph what happened inside the households, not outside on the front line.”

In her photo book, I Don’t Recognize Me in the Shadows, Faroq documents her journey from Yemen to the Netherlands, from one refugee camp to another. “I wanted to figure out the war, the escape, the transition, the unfamiliar—everything,” she said. “So photography was a way to process it all...to create a memory archive of all of my emotions, the nostalgia, sadness, anger.”

Faroq places a particular emphasis on visualizing her trauma through photography. “Creating this work enabled me to tackle the trauma and confront it on my own terms,” she explained. Her new project, “There is a Blue Sky Today and No Rain,” is a multimedia venture to create an emotional history. “I am exploring the complex emotional interior landscape of women in exile in a visual way,” she explained.

Born and raised in Chicago and now based in Los Angeles, Yasmine Nasser Diaz utilizes mixed media collages, immersive media installation, fiber etchings and videos in her works. “Collage inherently is an apt medium for a child of immigrants or someone who encompasses third world identity,” she noted.

Diaz relates to “taking images and materials that come from different places, produced by different people from different backgrounds and forcing them to live together on this piece of paper,” she said. “Many of us feel made up of odd parts in this new home where we don’t necessarily feel at home.”

Shaima Al-Tamimi, a Yemeni-East African visual storyteller, presently splits her time between Qatar and the UAE, where she grew up. Prior to the war, which began in 2014, migration was commonplace for Yemenis. It “is embedded into our lives,” she explained.

Al-Tamimi created a project with the Arab Documentary Photography Program that she eventually turned into the film “Voices from the Urbanscape,” which reflects her family’s efforts to move back to their homeland. Using old photos, letters, memorabilia and family stories, she pieced together her family’s journey.

“I really wanted to take back control of our narrative,” she explained. “In the media the story [of Yemenis] is told by non-Yemenis. I never saw people like me on TV or in books. I wanted to connect with my ancestors…and to correct and explore the narrative about why we left Yemen in the first instance.”

—Elaine Pasquini OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

The most beautiful restaurant experience?

In 2019, my husband and I went to Beirut for the first time. His great-great-grandparents immigrated to the U.S. from Lebanon, but he had never had a chance to visit until then. One of our most memorable afternoons was the day we went to Bourj Hammoud, Beirut’s Armenian neighborhood. We started with some window-shopping and then stopped at a place called Badguer, an Armenian restaurant and cultural center. It felt like being in your grandparents’ house — immediately cozy, inviting, and filled with nostalgia.

We were greeted by Arpi, the founder, and her father, who was in his nineties and was cracking jokes the entire time. We stayed for lunch and I still remember the meal. Spicy potatoes, beef kebab with sour cherries, and soujouk cooked in a spicy, tangy sauce with onions and tomatoes. It was easily one of our favorite meals of the trip. Afterwards, Arpi took us on a tour that ended in a room filled with hundreds of Armenian embroideries. She carefully picked out some of her favorites to show us, filling us in on the history of various designs. The detail of the needlework was incredible. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

It was the kind of experience that stays with you in a way that a visit to most four- or five-star restaurants does not. It is also one of my favorite things to do while traveling abroad — spend time in diasporic communities. Regardless of the country or the origin of the migrant community, I somehow feel more at home in these areas. Perhaps this is because of the intensely diverse immigrant community I grew up in on Chicago’s north side. There is a special kind of “home-making” that those in diaspora create. While the people, customs, and flavors may differ,

there is a unique familiarity that undeniably resonates across borders.

Our Contributors

Yasmine Nasser Diaz

Yasmine Nasser Diaz is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice weaves between culture, class, gender, religion, and family. She uses mixed media collage, immersive installation, fiber etching, and video to juxtapose discordant cultural references and to explore the connections between personal experience and larger social and political structures. Born and raised in Chicago to parents who immigrated from the rural highlands of southern Yemen, her work is often rooted in personal histories and competing cultural values.

VICTORIA Rosselli Illustrator

Victoria Rosselli is a Brooklyn-based art director and designer who operates in brand and editorial. She is currently a designer on the Special Projects team at T Brand.

PRATT FINE ARTS LAUNCHES A NEW MENTORSHIP PROGRAM TO EMPOWER EMERGING ARTISTS Posted on Monday, May 03, 2021 OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

The participants in the first Pratt>FORWARD, from L to R, top: Zalika Azim, Na’ye Perez, Becci Davis, Jackie Slanley, Nicoletta Daríta de la Brown; bottom: Jin-Yong Choi, Yasmine Nasser Diaz, Dewy, Jamaal Peterman, Phylicia Ghee

For emerging artists looking ahead to lifelong creative careers, one of the greatest resources is the mentorship of fellow artists and creative professionals. This spring, Pratt Fine Arts launched Pratt>FORWARD to introduce emerging artists to leading contemporary artists, curators, gallerists, thought leaders, and creative practitioners. Through a series of dialogue sessions and studio visits that were organized to encourage discussion and collaboration, participants learned how to develop and sustain their lives as artists. They also explored how to be cultural advocates and leaders who can build artist-led models for cultural engagement.

Pratt>FORWARD is co-directed by Mickalene Thomas, BFA Fine Arts ’00, and Chair of Fine Arts Jane South. The program is focused on artists at the beginning of their careers with participation being fully funded. Its core mentors include Pratt Trustee and alumnus Derrick Adams, BFA Art and Design Education ’96; collector and art advisor Racquel Chevremont; artist and co-founder of NXTHVN Titus Kaphar; arts organizer and Director of Company Gallery Elizabeth Lamb; and activist and the Bronx Museum’s Holly Block Social Justice Curator Jasmine Wahi.

“I know that the participants all walked away with ideas, tools, strategies, and systems to support a studio practice that is steadfast,” Thomas said. “I walked away OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

humbled and grateful for their time. Moving forward, I only ask that they all continue with their endeavors as artists and know that I’m their biggest advocate.”

The program reinforces Pratt Fine Arts’s ongoing efforts to address how academic institutions can play an important role in reimagining power structures to make them more equitable and accessible. For instance, initiatives like the visiting fellowships for artists with community-engaged practices have included Shaun Leonardo whose 2018 event Long Table provided space for an informal conversation on the nature of community and belonging.

“A supportive community is fundamental to helping emerging artists grow and thrive,” South said. “Along with professional practice skills sharing and dialogues on developing artist-centered platforms and communities, it is an ongoing mentorship community that Pratt>FORWARD provides. With each annual program, we will connect past participants to program artists and mentors. Over time this will establish a robust network that will not only be beneficial to individual participants but will create the conditions in which innovative artist-centered platforms can be generated.”

Pratt>FORWARD also expands Fine Arts’s commitment to bolstering the careers of alumni, such as showcasing their work at UNTITLED, Art Miami in 2018 and 2019. Of the 10 inaugural participants who joined Pratt>FORWARD this March and April, five were Pratt Fine Arts alumni, with Jin-Yong Choi, MFA ’20, Dewy, MFA ’20, Na’ye Perez, MFA ’20, Jamaal Peterman, MFA ’19, and Jackie Slanley, MFA ’20, and five were non-alumni, with Zalika Azim, Nicoletta Daríta de la Brown, Becci Davis, Yasmine Nasser Diaz, and Phylicia Ghee. The size of the group was intentionally kept small so the discussions would be intimate.

“Being a part of the Pratt>FORWARD program felt like a continuation of the professional practices course I took at Pratt,” Dewy said. “I felt as though valuable information was shared in a forum of inquisitive minds and peers.”

When the pandemic shifted Pratt>FORWARD into an online format, it allowed the participants and mentors to collaborate fluidly throughout their time together. Using the OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Milanote app, they shared portfolios, ideas, inspirations, reading lists, legal advice, and other resources, with their Zoom chats becoming part of this evolving archive. The virtual format helped to level the traditional hierarchies of a college setting so everyone had an equal voice. Online studio visits with Pratt>FORWARD’s guest artists, curators, and gallerists offered room for the participating artists to discuss their work and ask the guests questions one-on-one.

“From the group discussions, I gained effective strategies and tips for navigating my professional practice,” Davis said. “Through studio visits, I learned how to position my work and how to more intentionally engage with my audience. From my peers, I also gained immeasurable support and inspiration.”

Yasmine Nasser Diaz, “Exit Strategies” (2018), installation (photo by Stacie Jaye Meyer)

Over five consecutive Thursdays, participants and mentors joined guest speakers in open dialogue sessions addressing aspects of the practice of contemporary art. For a discussion on how artists can create opportunities and make space for each other, Adams and Kaphar were joined by artist Nina Chanel Abney and artist Ambika Trasi, a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Eric Shiner, executive director of Pioneer Works, and Sarah Workneh, co-director of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, later joined Wahi for a conversation on nonprofit platforms, while a discussion on museums, public art, and alternative spaces included Director of New York City's Percent for Art Program Kendal OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Henry and Christopher Y. Lew, Nancy and Fred Poses associate curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The range of speakers representing some of the leading figures in the art world made these weekly meetings dynamic spaces for sharing ideas and insights. “This setting allowed for very candid and honest conversations about the kind of art world nuts and bolts that many of us do not talk about enough,” Nasser Diaz said.

Other Pratt>FORWARD sessions were led by specialists on the legal issues and economics of art, such as Emily McElwreath of art consultancy Sidel & McElwreath who joined Chevremont, Lamb, and Thomas for a candid look at the art market. Each conversation offered time for the participants to ask questions and share their own experiences.

“The program puts the wellbeing of artists at the forefront,” Slanley said. “As the weeks progressed, I was able to define success for myself.”

It was important to the Pratt>FORWARD co-directors that the program allows its participants to concentrate their energy on creating connections and spending time talking about aspects of art careers that are often tackled alone, such as communicating with curators on exhibition plans and considering how their work relates to fluctuations in the art market like the emergence of NFTs. They also addressed how they could be cultural advocates through nonprofit organizations and civic engagement by being cognizant of current issues and how to be active in them.

“Traversing all of the layers of being an artist—navigating the art world, connecting with and building community, the marketplace, and the logistics of being a creative entrepreneur—has a great impact on our ability to attain, maintain, and achieve success,” Ghee said. “The mentors have a wealth of knowledge from navigating their own challenges and triumphs and they generously shared that with us.”

The next open call for Pratt>FORWARD is planned for the fall. By creating an artist-led platform for networking and community, Pratt>FORWARD is cultivating agency for emerging artists so they can develop artistic lives that are fulfilling and sustainable. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

“The resources I gained are invaluable,” said de la Brown. “I am excited about what is coming next and supporting others as I grow as an artist. I am leaving with a new community that feels like family.” OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

10 Middle Eastern Artists to Discover

Rawaa Talass

Mar 18, 2021 1:12pm

Yasmine Nasser Diaz

B. 1977, Chicago. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

Yasmine Nasser Diaz Graduation Day, 2020 Ochi Projects $5,000 OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Yasmine Nasser Diaz Say No To Drugs, 2020 Ochi Projects $6,000

Diaz has so far explored this tension of collectivism versus individualism through striking neon, collage, fiber etchings, and site-specific installations. Her ongoing “Teenage Bedroom” series invites the viewer into her intimate, pink-hued world, transporting one back to her 1990s teenage years spent in the bedroom with her friends and sisters, taking snapshots, chatting and dancing to music in this little cocoon. On the other hand, the work uncovers struggles the artist battled with while living in a conservative household. At one point, while in the process of planning her future by applying to colleges, she escaped from a prospective forced arranged marriage. As an independent feminist who can now speak her mind, Diaz hopes her art can spark conversations towards achieving equality of the sexes. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

how three artists dealt with Covid foiling their shows Jan 31

YASMINE DIAZ

LA-based Yasmine Nasser Diaz is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice navigates overlapping tensions around religion, gender, and third-culture identity. Her recent work includes immersive installation, fber etching, and mixed media collage using personal archives and found imagery.

Yasmine’s solo-show soft powers was scheduled to open at the Arab American Museum in March of 2020. The work is still being “held hostage” as the show will run when the museum reopens. The video preview of the exhibition contains behind the scenes shots and Diaz’s commentary.

Say No To Drugs, silk-rayon fiber etching, 30” x 38 OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

I

soft powers is my frst solo museum exhibition. I'd had two small solo shows prior to that but never at a gallery or institutional space. So this moment was signifcant.

My family immigrated from Yemen to Chicago in the late 60s before I was born. Arranged marriage was standard practice in our community - there was no alternative. No women in our community lived independently from men. Your father was responsible for you and then your husband. I knew from a young age that I didn't want to be restricted that way and saw no path for compromise. At 19, I left with two of my fve sisters. For almost 20 years, the three of us were estranged from most of our family.

My artwork had never addressed my background until around 2016, when I made a major shift in my practice. Though I had a lot of trepidation around coming out about my past, I chose to make directly autobiographical work. Telling my story was a way to lay a foundation for ideas I wanted to explore in the future, such as layered narratives of third-culture identity and code-switching.

She'd seen it all, 40 “x 24; Noxema & Lipliner, 48” x 36, silk-rayon fiber etchings OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

II

The show at the Arab American National Museum was an opportunity to expand my work beyond my experience. Creating a fctional narrative allowed me to inhabit multiple points of view, reveal the complex inner worlds of my marginalized community and push back against reductive stereotypes.

I'd created two-bedroom installations before, but for this show, I invented a narrative about two Yemeni American teenaged sisters in the 90's. Some aspects are similar to my life, some had happened to people I knew, and others I imagined. The installation's interactive elements shed light on what a teenager might have been going through at that time: I commissioned author Randa Jarrar to write excerpts for their diaries. You can also pick up the telephone and hear recorded conversations of Yemeni American women talking about their adolescence. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

The second part of the show is a series of fber etchings. The images come from my archives of photographs of Yemeni women.

Whenever I saw burnout fabric in the garment district, I'd feel nostalgic. The sheer material was popular in the 90s and is often used in a Yemeni style of dress known as a dir'. Burnout, also known as devoré, is done via a reductive chemical process, and after meeting a fber artist, I taught myself how to do it in my studio. I was ready for a new technical challenge. It took lots of trial and error, and I ruined quite a lot of fabric in the process, but it was worth it. I love the result and the fact that the technique relates to the content.

Thick as Thieves, 2020, silk-rayon fiber etching, 28 " x 36 OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

III

The canceled opening was personally disappointing because it was going to be an opportunity for a family reunion. It would have been the frst time my sisters and some other family members would have been together in over 20 years. Now I fear that the momentum may be lost.

Most artists would probably agree that the process is often much more important than the fnished work -- that was very much the case for me with this show. Learning a new technique and producing a new body of work for the biggest show of my career was nerve-wracking at times. But those challenges made it all the more rewarding to see the fnished work installed in the museum. I felt a huge sense of accomplishment, pandemic or not.

soft powers, gallery view OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Archiving Immigrant Girlhood: Yasmine Nasser Diaz’ “soft powers”

BY SANA KHAN January 25, 2021

My interest in soft powers began somewhat unusually: while researching the Bolshevik feminist Alexandra Kollontai as an overzealous seventeen-year-old historian. Encouraged by my history teacher, I hoped to find out more about women revolutionaries. I visited the Russian Consulate library in my then-home of Mumbai to dig up whatever dirt I could about Kollontai. To my surprise and delight, the dusty library was like a Soviet time capsule, full of sci-fi, revolutionary treatises, and classics. (And nothing at all like Mumbai’s US Consulate library, which I had visited in my capacity as a US citizen, with its shiny security and SAT prep guides.)

While in search of Kollontai, I had stumbled upon a precious Cold War relic. This library was living proof of the cultural relationship between Soviet Russia and socialist India, of soft powers as I defined the term from then on. For me it was both a moment of grace and an adventure story, my first meeting with the serendipity of the archive. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

But what I hadn’t considered was how I might be extending this history of soft powers. By stepping into the library, as an adolescent who had almost run out of fingers to count the number of places I had lived, I was positioned as a kind of cultural intermediary. By enterprisingly adapting the sphere of politics to that of school, I reconciled a larger world with the microcosm through which I moved.

The story wasn’t about shifting settings, not exactly, but rather the special language required to create mutual intelligibility. And though hindsight is 20/20, it was not until I encountered the work of Yemeni-American artist Yasmine Nasser Diaz that I believed that history had perhaps not ended before me. Her work offered me a new definition of soft powers that changed the agents entirely.

Diaz depicts young immigrant women like me as cultural diplomats in their everyday interactions. She documents their negotiations in what amounts to an unconventional archive, showing how it can be imaginative, aesthetic, and personal.

For instance, in her silk-rayon velvet etching “Say No To Drugs,” her subject is three girls hanging out with each other. Two hold takeaway cups. The one in the center drapes her arms loosely on her friends; leans into the frame from a slight distance. The title makes its way onto a t-shirt. A border frames the etching. Another work is a life-size replica of a pastel pink double room. Between the twin beds, color-coordinated coverlets included, is a bedside table with two diaries that belong to a pair of fictional sisters. Crucially, the etching and installation convey nostalgia for a bygone era; a captured memory that embraces the inevitable subjectivity of history.

Bedroom Installation. Yasmine Nasser Diaz 2020. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

They are part of Diaz’ art exhibition, soft powers, on view at the Arab-American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, where she was an Artist-in-Residence in March 2020. Her actors are not Cold War era states, but rather young women of the next generation. Their abilities? Soft powers.

“The more layered and complicated your life is, the more nuanced and honed those skills [of diplomacy] become, which is why I think about it as a kind of superpower,” Diaz said to me on the phone.

Narrative is about what you choose to include. So are cross-cultural negotiations. To perform the necessary erasure for a fiber etching, you have to carefully administer an acidic paste that burns away the rayon and reveals the silk underbelly of the fabric. Burn-out fabrics are commonly used to make dir’oo, Yemeni dresses that represent womanhood. To write a diary, to decorate a room, you make aesthetic choices that are ultimately about how you wish to present yourself to the world. Where cultural diplomacy between states tends to be bullishly self-referential, here the self is an art form.

Typically, archives are the lettered traces of states – such as, however unintentionally, in the case of the consulate libraries in Mumbai. Diaz builds an unusual multimedia archive that puts the imagination in service of record-making. The scholar Saidiya Hartman has explored a similar approach, most recently in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments(2019). While Hartman’s work has initiated a wave of research that imaginatively iterates the past, there is insight that history can draw from the multimedia options of the visual arts, from velvet etching to immersive installation.

Diaz takes ownership of her mediums and asserts them as realms of agentic negotiation–of what is built and broken down; given and concealed. Strategy contextualizes immigrant girlhood. Often friendship is the driving force of soft powers, helping to unfold girls’ agency. Diaz is more interested in the interpersonal realm than making the girls symbols of entire cultures. Clues about life in the 90s come through their fashion choices and the solace that they find among other young immigrant women. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

In the fiber etching “Thick as Thieves,” three girls pose together. In “Noxzema and Lipliner,” a girl applies lipliner while acne cream sits in front of her. In “Truth or Dare,” one girl moves close to another, possibly whispering something in her ear. These are based on teenage photographs of herself and her friends. Their poses, so different than my own millennial, Internet-saturated camera anglings, bear a distinct time stamp. “The photos I used each displayed a sense of camaraderie and sisterhood,” Diaz said.

Diaz has an interest in coming-of-age stories and enlisted Randa Jarrar, author of the young adult novel A Map of Home (2008), to write the sisters’ diaries. Though this is the third version of the installation, it is the first one with diaries. These weave together the written and imagined and add to the artist’s archive of girlhood. They further illustrate the richness of source material to be found in the ephemera of daily life.

Even in the fiber etchings of girls alone, the sense that they speak a shared language comes through. These pieces highlight an animating friction of the show, that between collectivism and individualism. “Girls from immigrant families who migrated from the global south to the global north can experience a specific kind of tension that I’m really interested in exploring and understanding more, between collectivist and individualist cultures,” Diaz told me.

She mentioned that she chose not to fill in details of faces to preserve anonymity and to reference the censorship of women’s images in sections of the Arab world. “I’m also circumventing the censorship for my own reasons, as a layer of protection and privacy,” she clarified. That’s another motivation behind making the sisters fictional.

“Assuring them that they will remain anonymous allows them to share more with me. It’s a way of crossing this threshold of personal space into the public realm.” OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Diaz deliberately occults, fictionalizes, and combines her sources to convey her message. This approach, anathema to typical historical practice, suggests other, more creative, expressions of the past.

When it comes to the two sisters, Diaz wanted to show the complexity of young immigrant women. For instance, she is far from being deterministic about the relationship between faith and personality. She said, “the conservative one has a crush on a boy and she has a pregnancy scare, or she thinks she does, and the older sister who is more overtly rebellious in how she talks in her diary writes about how much she loves cooking with her mom.” As immigrants, their social negotiations are dynamic, and do not fit in with preconceived notions.

Conversation plays a large role in this project. Diaz talked about how there is always one person in group discussions who speaks up and who you then feel grateful for and how she wanted to be that person through her work. “It was important to me that through the lens of these teenage sisters, we learn how much is on a young girl’s shoulders,” she said.

She also seeks to provide a space where Arab women can speak candidly and without judgment. “I want to dissect these things that we go through but I don’t want to contribute to the demonization of our community,” she said.

Of course, the Covid-19 pandemic has interfered with the display of and programming around the show. To address this, Diaz made a video of the exhibition. She also participated in an initiative called Drive-By Art in LA, where she hung the fiber etchings in between trees. The effect was profound: “They were hanging on a string as if on a clothesline, blowing freely in the wind with the sun shining on them. It was really lovely.”

Seeing how Diaz imbues soft powers with life beyond the machinery of national regimes doesn’t change who the main characters are. It finds them, puts them center stage, makes them into art, gets you reckoning with them. In redefining the protagonists, Diaz reimagines what an archive can be and do. And as I think back to my own peripatetic girlhood, it helps me locate moments of OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM strength and ability – of soft powers. By the age of eighteen, I had lived in eight different places around the world and was immersed in five languages. I was a cultural agent as much as, and more than, any state. I take my terminology from Diaz. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Yasmine Nasser Diaz Grants for Visual Artists

Yasmine Nasser Diaz’s multidisciplinary practice navigates overlapping tensions around religion, gender, and third-culture identity. Born and raised in Chicago to parents who immigrated from the highlands of southern Yemen, her work often reflects personal histories and the contrasting values of the cultures she was raised within. Her fiber etchings, immersive installations and mixed media collage on paper draw from personal archives as well as found imagery and reflect on coming-of-age nostalgia, Yemeni American girlhood and the notion of soft power. Reframing the concept of soft power within her work, Diaz considers the covert skills that she and her sisters developed to adapt to their environments as children of immigrants being raised within tight-knit communities which often perpetuates the crystallization of a culture. (Excerpt and image above selected from grant proposal and the artist’s website. Artwork is copyright of the artist.) OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Velvet Revolution: Yasmine Nasser Diaz by Julie Schulte | Jan 5, 2021

Yasmine Nasser Diaz, "Upstairs (At Sumaya's)," 2020. Courtesy of Ochi Projects.

In visiting Yasmine Nasser Diaz’ show, “soft powers” at Ochi Projects, I had the rich pleasure of speaking with the artist about her process, intimate spaces and how soft powers are not only a cause for hope, but are—and always have been—a female superpower.

“Soft powers” is a breathtaking series of fiber etchings on velvet-patterned jewel tones, resplendent pearls, and ebonies—the images sourced from Diaz’ personal archive and collected from Yemeni-American girls she knew in her native Chicago. Diaz works with the images manipulating silkscreen stencils and then employs a burnout technique where the mixed-fiber material undergoes a chemical process to dissolve the cellulose fibers, revealing a semi-transparent pattern against the more solidly woven fabric. Burnout fabric—fashionable in the ‘90s—dates back to 19th-century France in Lyon, and served then as a less expensive, but still opulent, alternative to lace. Diaz explained that its proper name, devoré, is rooted in the French verb dévorer: to devour. As she detailed the intricate work of shaving tiny bits of velvet to trace the photographs, I felt the acute satisfaction found in redirecting destructive forces as an avenue toward beauty and preservation. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Yasmine Nasser Diaz, Say No To Drugs, 2020. Courtesy of Ochi Projects.

Each work in “soft powers” is mysterious and alluring in its own right, offering the same pleasure in discovery one experiences thumbing through antique film negatives at a flea market. With the facial features scraped away and blanched out, the viewer seeks not to identify who the figure is, but what she is doing. The nature of the burnout velvet allows Diaz to favor outlines and shadows so that we are drawn toward the position of a girl’s hands resting on her lap, or the way she holds her best friend around the waist. If in the original photograph their cheeks were pressed together as they embraced, in the etching, their cheeks now appear to merge—the devoré fabric allowing sisterly care to look how it feels.

Yasmine Nasser Diaz, On Hold, 2020. Courtesy of Ochi Projects.

Silkscreen stencils can conjure references to guerrilla art and punk rock, yet the use of velvet in the chosen color palette gives Diaz’ work an anachronistic charge. Burnout was not only popular in the ‘90s dELiA*s catalog, but used in dir’oo—a style of dress worn by engaged and married Yemeni women. Diaz explained that her mother was drawn to these shades in rich plums and burgundies, despite their colors not being traditionally found in Yemen; the jewel-toned palette speaks to hybrid culture in Diaz’ neighborhood, a mix of Sawana and Yemeni people. Although the shades undermine Yemeni authenticity, they clue us into the dynamism of third-culture identity. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Yasmine Nasser Diaz, Graduation Day, 2020. Courtesy of Ochi Projects.

According to Diaz, “soft powers’” premise of “attraction rather than coercion”—is something innate to feminity. The term encompasses the cultural code-switching familiar to children of immigrant parents; it is never articulated that this is what you do, but is born from watching closely those around you. When Diaz stressed to me the importance of showing girls existing in their own spaces; that being in each other’s rooms afforded a retreat from the feeling of being hyper-surveilled and judged by family and the world, I realized it would be a misreading of her work to see these rooms as spaces of confinement; these are spaces where multiple identities can coexist and flourish. In these teen spaces, now nostalgic, where our friends felt like magical beings who might usher us into our next iteration, where the objects inside are imbued with emotion and experience, watching is reimagined. Close-looking occurs not to monitor and control the girls, but to delight in and celebrate them—girls look to each other and wonder at how she dresses, how she wears her hair, what tape is playing in the boom box. I told Diaz I felt she beautifully honored the “girl gaze”—the gawking impulse to admire, adore and document: Didn’t we all have an older girl who was a demigod to us? Who taught us how to dance? Who we’d mimic to the point of embarrassment? Diaz smiled and drew my attention to a tiny poster of the indie band Sebadoh in one of the works, explaining, “I kept that in the image because my sister was obsessed with them, and so, of course, I was too.” OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Diaz’ etchings were born out of her collage practice; what began with wanting to incorporate fabric onto the collages soon became working entirely with the textile. While the allure of collage is in the snipping away of images to serve a precise and controlled impression, burnout is fussy and unpredictable. Once she’s begun the chemical process, she must work quickly, and despite her intention and precision with stenciling, “when I begin etching, I realize the velvet will do what the velvet wants to do,” she said. In my favorite piece in the show, three young women pose together for the camera. By the tilt of their heads, we know they are playful. Their bodies merge like a mountain range, the particulars of each arm trailing off, melting like amber. According to Diaz, the velvet did what it wanted, and she was pleasantly surprised with how it evolved. As we moved through the show, Yasmine would hold up her phone, using the flashlight function to illuminate the pieces. She was gracious and inviting, and when I looked where she did, the background textile would sparkle through the velvet that had been scraped away: a girl’s peasant blouse was now flecked with gold dust, a curlicue of a landline snaking down a breastbone appeared 3D, taking on the sensual pleasure of a shadow box

In trusting that the velvet will do what it will do, in going towards the spaces and women she loved, Yasmine Nasser Diaz offers us a retreat to a space where watching is not about surveillance, but about care, where we can be invited into feminine space and leave astonished. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Meet Yasmine Nasser Diaz, Multidisciplinary Artist & Fiber Etching Warrior

Yasmine Nasser Diaz is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice navigates overlapping tensions around religion, gender, and third-culture identity. Her recent work includes immersive installation, fiber etching, and mixed media collage using personal archives and found imagery.

Born in Chicago to Yemeni parents, her upbringing encompassed a complicated relationship with Islam and the patriarchal social norms in their community, and the boundary-pushing icons of 80’s and 90’s Western pop culture.

I fled a pending forced arranged marriage, religious conservatism, and oppressive misogyny. These are not tidy topics to discuss in today’s society. Right-wing media eagerly uses them to incite xenophobia but dialogue that challenges misogyny remains crucial. My current work lives in this terrain. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

In her current exhibition “soft powers: A Solo Exhibition by Yasmine Nasser Diaz” on display at the Arab American National Museum, she reflects on coming-of-age nostalgia and Yemeni American girlhood. This exhibition features never before shown fiber etchings and a site-specific installation that is a continuation of her “Teenage Bedroom” series. Diaz addresses subjects familiar to many children of immigrants including code-switching, plural identities and conflicting loyalties.

At that age there was often a feeling of being hyper surveilled and some days for communities there can be a sense of communal obligation to protect young girls who are becoming women but for us as teenagers there was a fine line between protection and control. With this work I wanted to focus on those moments when we were amongst each other and not having to worry about who might be watching. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

November 2020 Putting Tem Together:Yasmine Nasser Diaz A key aim of Painting in Text has always been to get different perspectives on art practice, and with that in mind I made a concerted effort to look at artists outside of my own personal experience. It was through those efforts that I came across Yasmine Nasser Diaz, a multi-disciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, CA. The way she combines different element’s not only in her collage but in her installation work is so deftly done. It was such an enjoyable experience talking to Yasmine and I am glad I got the opportunity.

Let’s start with your recent exhibition, ‘soft powers’.

‘soft powers’ builds upon work from the last three to four years. The show itself consists of two main parts: an installation and a series of fibre etchings.

The first iteration of the installation was for the 2018 exhibition, ‘Exit Strategies’ at the Women’s Center for Creative Work in Los Angeles. I recreated a semblance of the teenage bedroom that I shared with my sisters. The details in the room span a range of time periods as there is a large age gap between my sisters and I and my family lived in that house OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM for close to 30 years. The wallpaper and wood panelling were from the 70s–wood panelling being common in Chicago basements. Most of the pop culture artefacts were from the 80s and 90s when I was a child and adolescent.

‘soft powers‘ installation shot Arab American National Museum, 2020 The installations have always meant to be interactive. Visitors are encouraged to listen to the cassettes and spray the perfumes that were popular in the 90s. Scent is the most visceral way to conjure nostalgia and memory, it can be a kind of instant time travel. The installation for ‘soft powers’ is different in that it is not autobiographical. I created a fictional narrative to build the room that belonged to a pair of Yemeni-American sisters, Dina and Saba. I enjoyed using fiction for the first time because it allowed me to inhabit multiple voices. I was fortunate to collaborate with author Randa Jarrar who wrote the text for the sisters’ diaries. We developed storylines that spoke to the complexities of adolescence – coming of age and trying to find yourself while also navigating these seemingly disparate worlds. Can you explain what you mean when you talk about disparate worlds? OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

This is where the title, ‘soft powers’ comes from. The term is typically used to describe a strategy in diplomatic relations, the ability to attract or subtly persuade someone to get what you want or need. I’m nudging that interpretation a bit to refer to a skill that we begin to develop as children when we first start to learn how to adjust our behavior to achieve a desired result. You could say this starts when we identify which parent we can get we get what from. I’m honing in on the more nuanced skills of children of immigrants, specifically those of families who migrated from the Global South to the Global North. For many of us, the home and what exists outside of the home are two very different cultural worlds. I, for example, was born and raised in Chicago, in a pretty tight-knit Yemeni community. At the same time, I was attending public schools that were extremely diverse with classmates of many different ethnic and religious backgrounds. The U.S. is more of an individualistic society compared to the community that I was being raised in at home, which is very collectivist-minded – decisions are often made in the best interest of the family and the community.

These different worlds convey disparate messages to young people still forming their identities and values. I’m not advocating for one way over the other as there are pros and cons to both. There were challenges though in navigating between a society that prized individual expression versus one which valued the community and tradition more. I learned how to behave ‘appropriately’ in both worlds, like many young women do. We’ve become very adept at switching between environments. People talk about code-switching a lot these days, which usually refers to language, but I think that it can apply to so much more. There is also what we decide to share in line with the way we want to be perceived. That’s what I mean by ‘soft power’: the various and nuanced ways we refine the ways we communicate. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

‘Exit Strategies’ installation shot Women’s Center for Creative Work, 2018, photo by Jaye Meyer

You mentioned that this is the third time you have installed the work… That’s right. The first was ‘Exit Strategies’ in 2018 and the very next year, I installed ‘Dirty Laundry’ during a residency at Habibi House in Detroit. There are changes with each iteration. I thought that Detroit might be the last time because those first two versions were directly autobiographical and the process of creating and sharing the work was pretty taxing. I had, for the first time, shared some intensely personal details. For example, after I graduated high school, I left home with two of my sisters and we were basically estranged from our family for a very long time. We did not see the rest of our family for almost 20 years. I included references to that part of my past in those first two installations – some documentation of our name-changing process and correspondence during a period when I was trying to get legal help. In the process of sharing the work, I met with visitors and spoke about it quite a bit. To talk about these things repeatedly was emotionally exhausting but in ways also cathartic, it has been rewarding in so many ways. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

‘Dirty Laundry‘ installation shot, 2019 , photo Noura Ballout

I’m aware that I am often the first person of Yemeni background that people meet, in Europe or the US, so I often feel the need to clarify that although forced arranged marriage and honour violence does exist in our communities, they are certainly not faced by all Yemeni women. I don’t ever want my personal experience used in a way that adds to the xenophobia that exists in the world. Nevertheless, these are issues that our communities don’t talk about enough. It’s a precarious place to be.

When the Arab American National Museum saw my installation in Detroit and invited me to do a solo show, I reconsidered my stance on not creating another bedroom installation. It was extremely meaningful to have an opportunity to bring a conversation that centres Yemeni American adolescence and girlhood to an institution that is important to the community. The first two iterations were in community-oriented spaces, the Women’s Center for Creative Work, a wonderfully supportive community, and then at a grassroots residency in what was essentially someone’s home. The Arab American National Museum is in Dearborn Michigan, right next to Detroit. That area has the largest Arab American population in the United States, which is very relevant to the context of the work. My parents immigrated to nearby Chicago in the late 60s so the area is essentially an extension of home. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

While this installation is not directly autobiographical, it still draws heavily from my own background. Working with fictional characters was liberating. While I feel that all work is somewhat autobiographical as you can’t help but be a part of what you create but fiction can make it a little easier. I think that almost every person holds different identities at once and I love how fiction can be a tool to mine from different parts of one’s self. There is so much freedom in it.

Before going further, it might be good to describe the process of fibre etching for those who are unfamiliar..

I like to call them fibre etchings because the effect is not like the industrial velvet burnout that people are used to seeing in clothing or drapery. This is done by hand, and it’s pretty labour intensive, especially when it comes to the larger pieces. I mostly use velvet for [the etchings] but have also used other materials like satin. Basically, the fabric has to be a composite [made of two different kinds of material], in this case I’m using mostly silk-rayon composites. It’s a reductive process wherein a chemical removes the rayon portion, so the silk backing remains. Some parts of the fabric remain opaque while others are more sheer. I use personal photographs as source material to create the images.

Where have you sourced the photographs?

They are mostly my own personal photos from around the time I was in high school. There’s a relationship between the fibre etchings in ‘soft powers’ and the collage pieces in ‘Exit Strategies’. Both feature images of my sisters and I in our bedroom with our faces removed, which I’ve done for several reasons. The space and context is quite vulnerable to share, as is with all of the personal details. The anonymity essentially serves as a layer of protection. In some cases, it has allowed me to use images that I might not otherwise be able to use. The scenes are intimate and the photographs were not taken for public consumption. I was also thinking of the censorship of images of women in certain parts of the world. The removal of the face is a kind of censorship but it’s a censorship within my control in support of my own intentions. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Exit Strategies’ installation shot Women’s Center for Creative Work, 2018, photo by Jaye Meyer

For ‘soft powers’, I sourced images, not only from my archives but also from other Yemeni American women, some of whom were family and friends. They allowed me the privilege of going through some of their photo archives. I was looking for snapshots of women-identifying people taken in their own spaces – casually hanging out in bedrooms or other private spaces where they didn’t have to worry about who else was around. I think it is true for girls of all different backgrounds that our bedroom spaces are something very special to us.

In my experience, Yemeni immigrant communities tend to be more insular than other Arab groups. They are generally more closely-knit and socially conservative. For young women, these spaces become even more of a sanctuary where we can let our guards down and be ourselves. These photographs are taken by us, for each other. They are seemingly mundane and affectionate scenes of girls passing the time, that is what I wanted to focus on in these etchings.

Your work plays with the idea of creating empathy through familiarity. Can you talk a bit about that? OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

I think there is instant familiarity in these spaces. When I was first considering talking about some of the more sensitive subjects and sharing some of my personal documents, I had a lot of anxiety. I knew the risk of being made out to be a representative of the Yemeni experience even though that has never been my intention. I wanted to talk about some of the issues that are important to me through the construction of a space that had a sense of nostalgia. Bedroom spaces invite a natural feeling of comfort but I included things that complicate that quality of comfort and nostalgia. There are memories that I recall fondly from that time and others that are very troubling.

When people enter the space, the first things they tend to notice are the signifiers of another era – the groovy wallpaper, the fun pop-culture artefacts. Upon closer inspection, other details emerge that tell a story more specific to the room’s inhabitants. Even though the viewers know it’s a fictional space, there is still this feeling of voyeurism that makes them pause and question, “Should I be in here looking at this diary?” It triggers an instinctive feeling of empathy and can be an effective way of communicating. Nostalgia has such a wide range of associations for people, and I certainly don’t think all nostalgia is inherently good but I’m thinking about it in both a fond way and a complex way.

‘soft powers’ installation shot Arab American National Museum, 2020

Has collage always played a part in your practice? OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Collage is still relatively new to me. I was primarily painting before I got into collage about four years ago. I found the shift liberating. I experienced a playfulness that I hadn’t felt in a really long time. It was similar to that uninhibited feeling we experience as children when we made art without overthinking. I see a lot of similarities between the process of collage and the experience of being an immigrant or child of immigrants. You are often taking materials from different places and putting them together – images and source material that seemingly have no business being together forced to live in a new place.

‘Call Waiting’, (2018), collage,

It’s an apt medium for telling some of these stories. I try to keep that feeling of playfulness in my work by doing a warm-up collage when I get to the studio. I’ve started doing a little workshop around this; it’s very simple and there is no intention, just like that feeling I had when I first started collage. It is very easy for artists, once they hone a technique, to lose that feeling of playfulness. I want to maintain that and continue to access my intuition.

There are also more overtly political collages such as The day after (2018). Could you talk about that? OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

‘The day after’ emulates the front page of a newspaper. Stylistically, I was pulling from The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. It references the day after a Saudi airstrike landed in a very busy district in Yemen and struck a school bus carrying a group of kids on a field trip. At least 40 children died, and over 50 people in total were killed. It did make some headlines but not as many as it would have had it happened elsewhere. In the U.S., the news coverage is really not proportionate to our involvement in foreign conflict.

The day after, (2018), collage and acetone transfer on hand-cut watercolor paper, 76.2 x 55.88cm

Yemen has been engaged in a war now for six years, and the US has been involved by supporting Saudi Arabia. This is huge because if we pulled out, it would have a drastic effect on the war. We are the number one supplier of arms in the world, in particular to Saudi Arabia. The bomb that landed on those kids was American-made but so many people don’t know this. There is a disconnect between our involvement and our knowledge of this war.

I created this work on invitation to a show of all Yemeni artists reflecting on the war. At first, I struggled with my own identity and responsibility– born, raised, and living in the U.S., I had visited Yemen once but have never lived there. Who am I to talk about this? I felt most obligated to bring attention to our (i.e., the U.S.) role in the conflict. Most of the work I created is a critique of U.S. media coverage of the war. I’ve OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM barely scratched the surface as there are a lot of questions we should be asking. What makes headline news? What takes priority? Who is making those decisions and why? Instead of

Averting is easy, (2018), Mixed media collage and glitter on watercolor paper, 76.2 x 55.88cm being informed of the most vital issues, much of our news consumption is clickbait-driven.

Queensfest 2020 OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Queensfest 2020 “In Studio” series hosted by Michelle Joan Papillion with emerging artist Yasmine Naseer Diaz. For full video click is LINK

ARTS CALENDAR (HYBRID MODEL): OCTOBER 8-11 SHANA NYS DAMBROT OCTOBER 7, 2020 OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Yasmine Nasser Diaz (Courtesy of Ochi Projects)

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10 Yasmine Nasser Diaz: Soft Powers at Ochi Projects. This body of work, also exhibited at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, MI, reflects on coming-of age nostalgia and Yemeni-American girlhood. The notion of soft power is understood as the ability to attract and co-opt, rather than coerce. Reframing this concept within her work, Diaz considers the covert skills that many begin to develop as children. The exhibition showcases new silk-based fiber etchings that utilize photographic images depicting intimate moments of leisure amongst familiar company. Ochi Projects, 3301 W. Washington Blvd., West Adams; October 10 – November 21, by appointment; ochigallery.com. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Shoutout LA October 5th 2020

Hi Yasmine, how do you think about risk? I love this question because it speaks to my favorite piece of advice for younger people–the lesson of failure. That is, to not only not be afraid of failure, but to welcome the lessons that taking a risk and failing can teach you. For years, I was so paralyzed by the fear of making the wrong move that I took very few risks. My growth really suffered for it. Now I know that if I’m too comfortable or complacent about the work I’m doing, it usually means it’s tepid and likely not saying anything interesting. I consider my art career as having started just a few years ago, essentially when I was finally ready to address issues that were more important to me. I began this shift with a body of work that is autobiographical — that was new and vulnerable territory for me, something I intentionally steered clear of before. I’m a Yemeni-American woman and I was raised in a socially conservative Muslim family. Some of the things I address in my work challenge the misogyny of my community of origin. While the issues are global, because I’m talking about them through a particular lens at a particular time (i.e. as an Arab in a post-9/11 United States), my concern was that my work might be used in a way that fueled hateful rhetoric and bigotry. I try to address issues in ways that are nuanced and complicated. So far I can say that these risks have been very much worth taking. Sharing my own reality has led to thoughtful and generative dialogue with people of similar backgrounds as well others, which I did not expect. It’s been extremely rewarding and cathartic. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community? Since last fall, I’ve branched out to working more with textiles. I learned the process of fiber etching, also known as burnout, and have been using this technique to create images that are an extension of my collage and photo-based work. The first series of fiber etchings are translations of personal photos — my own and those of other Yemeni-American women I’ve collected. I had been incorporating imagery of textiles more in my collages and actual fabric pieces in my assemblages when I came across some old photos of family members wearing dresses made with burnout fabrics. Burnout was popular in the 90s when I was growing up and is the time period this work focuses on. It was also often used to make a Yemeni style of dress called a dir’ which some say is only to be worn by married or engaged women. This work centers adolescence and more specifically, Yemeni-American girlhood, so this new medium hit a lot of marks for me. I initially created this series, along with an immersive site-specific installation, for my first museum solo show at the Arab American National Museum in Michigan. That show has yet to physically open to the public due to the pandemic but I am very excited to be presenting an iterative exhibit of this work in my show soft powers, which opens at Ochi Projects in Los Angeles on October 10.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to? It’s so strange to think about that as we’re still in a phase of sheltering in place while the fires are raging and the hazardous air is forcing us to stay indoors even more. Oof. It’s a lot. Generally, my recommended itinerary for LA visitors is 90% centered around food. We are so lucky to live in a city with such ethnically diverse communities and dining, so I always want people to take advantage of that while they’re here. I still love the dining options at the old Farmer’s Market at 3rd and Fairfax. It’s all outdoors so I’m OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM assuming they are open at the moment. My favorite spot there is Banana Leaf which serves Indonesian food that is absolutely delicious. I love their mee goreng noodles. Korea Town, which is so unique to L.A., is an absolute must. Pre-Covid I would have definitely recommended dedicating a day to walk around the area, spend a few hours at a Korean spa followed by a Korean barbecue dinner and drinks at The Prince. Another favorite stop are the Venice Canals. They were recreated to replicate the appearance and feel of Venice, Italy. They feel a bit strangely out of place and I love them for it.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition? I always have to give a shout out to The Women’s Center for Creative Work, an L.A.-based nonprofit that has cultivated a very special community. The friends and support I have received via the WCCW have been integral to my relationship with this city and the creative feminist community. If you’re not familiar with them, I highly recommend checking out their core values which are a great example of how thoughtfully and thoroughly they think about the ways in which they engage with and support their members and broader community. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Bitch Magazine Issue #88 Fall 20 OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

31 Women August 8, 2020

Yasmine Diaz is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Born and raised in Chicago in a family of Yemeni immigrants, Yasmine’s work deals with themes such as religion and third-culture identity. On a hot July day (so hot that Yasmine kept putting frozen spinach bags under her overheating laptop), we had a fascinating conversation about growing up in a conservative environment, fighting for freedom, finding her path as an artist, as well as her first museum solo exhibition, soft powers.

You have a fascinating story. Can you tell us about your childhood and the environment you grew up in?

My parents were born and raised in the highlands of southern Yemen and immigrated to Chicago in the late sixties. A lot of my work stems from these extremely different worlds. My family practices Islam, but I’ve always felt myself to be agnostic. My parents weren't especially religious when I was growing up, but I understood at an early age that I wasn’t supposed to question being Muslim. But I did question it all the time, as OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

soon as I started learning about religion when we attended Islamic school on the weekends. This was one of the biggest struggles for me.

Where do you think that questioning came from?

It's one of those things that has always been inherently a part of me. Maybe it's the fact that my outside world was so different than the world at home. We had a pretty small and close knit Yemeni community that was within a few blocks of our neighborhood. But I didn't hear any of my cousins or siblings questioning the same way. Science always made sense to me in a very tangible way. Believing in something I couldn’t understand was something I had trouble wrapping my head around. It's religion in general, not just Islam.

What were your influences growing up?

There are nine kids in my family and I was the sixth. Our house was often full and chaotic so I was left to my own devices a lot and watched a ton of MTV. The kinds of things that were happening in pop culture in the eighties and nineties plays a huge part in my work.

There are images of Madonna and Salt-N-Pepa in my early collage work. I wasn't necessarily a huge fan of Madonna's music, but she was part of this genre of women that spoke very boldly and openly about having autonomy over their lives and about their own sexuality and sexual freedom. Coming from the conservative community I was being raised in, that was mind blowing. My family and our community was very gendered, often physically segregated. At parties or weddings, men would sit on one side, and women on another, or we would be in an entirely different space.

I was in awe of artists like Boy George, Grace Jones and Annie Lennox who often presented as androgynous and played with gender. Although I didn't feel tension necessarily around my own sexual identity, this made more sense to me than "you're a girl, you do this and your life looks like this. You're a boy, this is your role, etc." That was always very frustrating to me, how differently my brothers were treated compared to my sisters and I. I was being conditioned to understand my “lower” value as a young girl and this was also reflected in how adults interacted. It’s a lot for a child to take in. So those artists who disregarded gender rules were icons to me. They made me aware that there was an entirely different world out there, a whole different way of being.

Were there people - maybe outside your family - who had a different lifestyle than yours? Someone to look up to? OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

No one that I knew personally, only artists or characters in the books, movies and television I was consuming. Anytime I saw a young woman in a film or television show that lived alone or had her own place seemed like the most exciting thing. One of the first memories around this that I have is an illustrated children’s book where these ten or twelve years old girls lived in a cottage. I don't remember what the story was, but at some point they go into the forest, pick some berries and made some pies. And all I could think of was “There are no parents? It's just them? How did they do that? Nobody's chaperoning them? That's amazing.”

Most of my friends in school had a lot more freedom, and I was very envious of that. I wasn’t allowed to go to other friends’ houses that weren't in our Yemeni Muslim community so my world was really small. Once I was in high school, I started going to an after school art program. As soon as they let me do that, I started saying I was always there even when I wasn't, just to have some freedom and to stay out a couple hours after school.

What you were doing during those hours?

Sometimes I would go to a friend's house to just hang out, typical teenage stuff. I also went rollerblading a lot. I loved skating as fast as I could along the lake in Chicago. It gave me a huge sense of freedom. My parents definitely wouldn't have been OK with me skating around the city the way I did, and definitely not wearing shorts.

Eventually I started sneaking out at night and going to raves. Luckily, the house that we grew up in had a basement which made it easier to leave unnoticed. When I was around 11 my sisters and I moved our rooms into the basement which we had to ourselves. It felt like we had our own apartment. I had never even gone to a school dance before, so going from hanging out at the library to underground warehouse raves in the 90s was pretty intense. When you're a teenager, your world can feel so small and oppressive, so being able to just dance for hours and hours was extremely liberating.

How did you get into art?

I remember being interested in drawing as far back as kindergarten, so about five years old. The high school I attended was a magnet school where you had to decide on a major before attending. It was a no brainer that I’d be majoring in art.

Were your siblings into art, or were you the only one? OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

One of my older sisters used to draw a lot, and I would copy whatever she did. When I started learning how to paint with oils I fell in love immediately and thought I was going to be a painter.

What were you making?

A lot of still life paintings. One of the first oil paintings that I thought turned out OK, and is maybe still my favorite, is of my sister’s roller skates.

Growing up in a conservative environment, how do you break free from ingrained ideas, how do you rebel against it?

As I approached puberty, I understood that an arranged marriage was in my future. I had been matched with my father's sister's, son, my first cousin, who was in Yemen. I was a U.S. citizen, and a lot of arrangements are made with that in mind, for the prosperity of the family.

Several of my sisters were married when I was very young. When one of my sisters went through with an arranged marriage, but shortly after asked to be separated, a lot of things changed for us. That had never happened before in our community as far as I knew and it was like a stain on the family. Reputation was everything and it was made very clear that what other people thought was very important. More important than our own well-being in many cases. That's what made it easy for me to decide at a young age that I was going to leave one day.

Marriage was a huge cloud hanging over me. It's a bizarre way to live your childhood, knowing that was coming and that there was no compromise. There was no future that I could see where I could live the life that I wanted to live and have a relationship with my family. For a long time, my plan was to go to Australia by myself and try to start a life there.

Why Australia?

It was very far away, they spoke English and people there always seemed friendly in movies. Again, I was a teenager so...

When did you leave, and how did it happen? OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

I left with two of my older sisters a few months after I graduated from high school. We did some research and found these women who were going to help us in New Mexico.

How did you find those women?

Oprah’s TV show. She had a guest who spoke about a kind of underground network of women helping other women go into hiding. This was 1996, before the Internet. I went to the library, looked her up and reached out to her.

One of those women was a private investigator and the other was a social worker. They had a house ready for us and were trying to help us with our identity change. But things did not go smoothly. At one point, one of them destroyed my entire portfolio (including that painting of the roller skates). She said that anything that tied us to our past was a liability.

Because we knew there was a very strong likelihood that someone would be hired to find us, changing our names and our social security numbers was necessary in order to feel safe. At that time, there was no pathway to getting a new social security number for people in a similar situation like there is today. So our requests for new numbers were denied.

Essentially we resorted to a, let’s just say a creative alternate, - backup plan to establish our new identities (it is all legally sorted now). One by one, we each got new numbers and were able to start working. We bounced around from Santa Fe to Phoenix and eventually lived in Albuquerque together for a while.

What did your life in New Mexico look like?

It was very liberating, we had our own apartment, I started working at a coffee shop and my sisters worked at local restaurants. I continued to paint. The first place we signed a lease was right across the street from the University of New Mexico. Before leaving home, I had applied and was accepted into the programs I was really interested in - The Art Institute in Chicago, MICA, and RISD.

But with my new identity I couldn't enroll in a formal program without accessing my old school records and potentially jeopardizing our situation. I remember very hesitantly going to talk to an admissions counselor at the university one day. I don't recall the conversation, but it was a man and he wasn't very receptive, so I ended up walking away. I decided to educate myself in alternative ways. I signed up for classes at art centers and joined drawing groups. It's funny when you look back at these moments that can really make or break you. Somebody else could have really changed the trajectory of my life at that time. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Adolescence, religion, culture - are recurring themes in your work. There has been a tendency to view autobiographical work as solipsistic, or “lesser”. Did you struggle with making work about your life?

A hundred percent. I consider my career as it is now to have just started a few years ago. Before that I was mostly painting, sometimes doing photography, but it was not personal. As time passed and I had more distance from my past, I felt safer to talk about my life and became more self-assured. I was also hearing people speak about Arabs and Muslims and women in ways that were not very nuanced. There weren’t many conversations, for example, about the challenges of being an atheist or agnostic when you're raised Muslim. Talking about these things is like walking into a minefield, so I very intentionally decided to make my first body of work autobiographical. Being very specific about my story was a way of saying "this is where I'm coming from.” I'm Yemeni and yes, I'm talking about forced marriage and misogyny and honor based violence, issues that play into a negative stereotype. So I'm going to talk about them as well as the reasons why there is resistance in having these conversations. I got to a point where I didn't want to avoid it just because it's an inconvenient time, because it's always going to be an inconvenient time.

What was that first body of work?

One Way Or Another is a series of five collages about the summer I spent in Yemen when I was around 14 years old. Because of the difficulty with my older sister, my parents had sent me and my two brothers there for three months. We had very different experiences there. My brothers were taken out much more often and got to explore more of the country with my uncles while I would stay at home, cooking and cleaning with the women, making food for them.

In I know what boys like I was thinking about one day when we made breakfast for everyone then the men and boys went out for the day. Yemenis are very hospitable, so we never knew if they were bringing anyone back for a meal or how many people would come. They came back at lunch time with some men and we waited in another room for them to finish eating. I will never forget the stew we made that day, it was really delicious. We had chicken and we didn't always have chicken, and the vegetables were so fresh. They ate it all. Madonna’s very snarky stance in this image summed up my feelings. I remember watching them from behind a curtain thinking “those motherfuckers are eating my chicken.”

At the end of that summer I was told that my brothers were going back home and that might be left there. A few weeks before I had “inadvertently” met the boy I was arranged OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

to marry, so my head was spinning with what my being left behind could mean. I felt trapped. The piece One Way Or Another represents my escape plan which, if it came to it, was suicide. One of my grandmothers lived at the top of a steep cliff and I decided that’s where I would go. The film still is from Thelma and Louise which makes frequent appearances in my work. Then I saw it years after leaving home, it took me right back to that summer. In that moment, they chose having autonomy over their lives, which meant suicide, over succumbing to patriarchy. I had never contemplated ending my life before. It was not what I wanted to do, but not having control of my life and body was something I feared much more.

Can you tell us about soft powers? This is your first museum solo, currently on at the Arab American Museum of Detroit.

Soft powers builds upon work I’ve been doing for the past 2-3 years. It includes a bedroom installation which I first created during my residency at the Women's Center for Creative Work in Los Angeles in 2018. It was inspired by the basement bedroom that my sisters and I shared. There was carpet, groovy wallpaper, some furniture, and things like cassette tapes of artists we used to listen to. It was interactive, the way soft powers is meant to be. Visitors were encouraged to engage with the space; spray the perfumes, listen to the CDs and tapes. The room was meant to feel cozy and familiar, but there were also details that complicated the nostalgia. On the wall hung a long skirt with a pair of shorts tucked beneath it. On really hot days, I used to wear a skirt like that to cover the shorts beneath when I would go rollerblading. Scattered throughout the room were a few framed documents referencing our name changes and related correspondence.

So you weren't allowed to wear shorts. This idea of shame around sexuality is interesting, especially when it relates to young girls. At an age when you are not aware of your sexuality, having others see you through that lens and instilling in you a sense of implicit danger is really problematic

There is a word in Arabic, “eib”, that encompasses the conditioning of shame. There isn't an exact equivalent in English, but it's probably one of the first words that kids hear repeatedly from adults to teach them what is or isn’t permissible behavior. “Don't sit like that, don't speak too loudly, cross your legs”, and so on. I made a neon piece with my face as a child with the word “eib” looming largely over it. In the photo I’m about 7 or 8 years old, an age when I wasn’t thinking about my sexuality or myself in any sexual way. But I was being taught and made aware of how my body could cause shame. Many of us who grew up in conservative societies did not have conversations about sex or about our bodies, and you can forget about pleasure. But then, all of a sudden, you're supposed to get married and have sex right away. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Yes, exactly, it’s a loss of innocence. But back to soft powers.

At one point it became taxing to make autobiographical work, to constantly talk about and source from my experiences. With soft powers I knew right away that I wanted the bedroom to tell the story of a pair of fictional sisters. Fiction is such a great vehicle for holding multiple viewpoints that are rooted in very real scenarios. For example, one of the girls is more religious than the other. That's not something that I identified with, but I wanted to speak to that. There's this tension, this conflict within her. I collaborated with author Randa Jarrar who did an amazing job crafting the entries for the journals.

On the dresser, a bottle of Yemeni black seed oil sits next to Avon eyeshadow, which was all the rage in the 80s and 90s. There's also a jar of hair relaxer and a curling iron. Every woman in my family that had curly hair was straightening it. I was the first darker child in the family and my mom repeatedly told me to not spend too much time in the sun. It was clear that having lighter-skin and straighter hair was “better”.

There’s also a Trapper Keeper, a notebook that was popular among kids in the nineties. Inside it I placed a guidebook for social workers, health care workers, people who work at schools and police stations for how to handle a situation if they're approached by a young woman who may be dealing with a potential forced marriage.

You have also used fiber etchings for the first time, is that right?

Yes, it took me a while to get the hang of the burnout process but it was worth it. I invited other women to tell me their stories and to share photos of themselves which I used to create the fiber etchings. A few pieces include a second layer of store-bought burnout fabric containing patterns that are typical of the kind used in a Yemeni style of dress called a “dira”. Even though I’m working with fabric, I don’t see myself as a textile artist. I am coming at this from a place of collage. So much of what I do is collage, taking these often disparate things and putting them together.

Did you ever make it to Australia?

Yes! I went with my husband when he had a job there in 2016. We spent a week in Sydney and a week in Melbourne. It was amazing. I remember thinking I totally could have lived here. I would have been fine. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Mission Magazine 2020

In this edition of Artists in Quarantine, we digitally meet Yasmine Diaz, an artist based in LA, to talk about her mission to create space for every narrative.

Who is Yasmine Diaz? I was born in Chicago and now live in LA. I’m 43 years old but only started practicing as a full-time artist at 39; my unconventional personal history led to a late start. My parents immigrated to the U.S. from Yemen in the late ’60s. They were raised in the highlands of southern Yemen where my dad received minimal education and my mom none. Their marriage was arranged, as were all marriages in our family. Although not devout, our community was strictly Muslim. My siblings and I had a very different upbringing. Attending public school in Chicago, we were exposed to different lifestyles and cultural norms that often conflicted with the values we were raised with. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

As a kid, I understood early on that there were things I shouldn’t talk about or question. For example, I knew I was agnostic at a young age and that I didn’t want an arranged marriage. As I became an adolescent it was very clear that my hopes and intentions for myself were not aligned with those of my parents.

At that time, there was no woman in our family or community who lived independently. You were either someone’s daughter and lived at home, or were married. Anything different from that was unthinkable.

After graduating high school, I left home with two of my sisters. It was a very drastic separation. For 19 years we had no contact with our family and they didn’t know where we were. Unfortunately, at that time, the unwritten honor system translated to a very good chance of physical harm and retribution.

For years I made art independently and sporadically, avoiding personal subject matter or anything that spoke to who I was. Following 9/11, I grew restless about stifling myself. There was a lot of attention paid to Muslims and Arabs. It often fell into two overly simplified narratives. On the right we were demonized as angry barbaric terrorists, whilst on the left critical conversations were avoided, sometimes leading to cultural relativism regarding human rights violations. As an agnostic person of Muslim heritage, I felt that people like myself – who had complicated relationships with Islam – were getting lost between two opposing narratives.

My main hesitation in making the shift in my work was the fear that it would be used to fuel hateful rhetoric and bigotry. I try to talk about the issues that are important to me in ways that are nuanced and complicated. I share my reality in the hopes of encouraging thoughtful dialogue within communities, like the one in which I was raised.

How do you perceive creativity? At its most basic, art is a means of communication. I was raised to believe I should avoid bringing attention to myself; I should not be loud. I should be amenable and not difficult. I am still unlearning those thought patterns. It was not until I was able to start talking about these issues that I felt free. In many ways, art has been my therapy.

What overarching feeling do you have? This time is bringing things into sharp focus. I hope we learn to look after each other. Although we are physically distant, in a lot of ways we’re more connected than ever as we’re all in lockdown. I feel anxious but cautiously optimistic. I’m hopeful that this will lead to necessary change, but am all too aware of the history of repeated amnesia in this country.

Before lockdown, in big cities like LA, the pace was so fast. There was a constant atmosphere of “FOMO”. It felt like we had reached the peak of social-media sharing, hyper-productivity, and competitiveness. There was even competitiveness in areas that seemed counterintuitive, like meditation and self-care. Nothing was untouched by OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

capitalism, everything was commodified. This time is forcing us to re-evaluate society and ourselves, to slow down and be present.

What’s fed your soul in quarantine? I’ve fallen on the baking bandwagon. I’ve wanted to make bread for a long time and finally have. My husband and I are improving our apartment. Before lockdown, we were working in different states and were set to be apart for about five months, so it was nice to come home and be together with our cats.

I am fortunate to have a studio and have been easing back into simple collage making. I start without an agenda and allow myself to work intuitively with whatever materials I have in front of me. It’s liberating, relaxing, and energizing. I’ve been making greeting card collages and giving them to friends, encouraging them to send them on.

Seeing the creative ways people are helping each other has been encouraging. One friend raised money to buy food from local restaurants and is having meals delivered to the homeless and frontline workers.

What had you forgotten you loved? Reading books! Like many, I don’t have the attention span I used to (the curse of the digital age). That began to bother me. I want to recalibrate and be more mindful. Spending time doing things like cooking without feeling rushed to be somewhere has been nice. Phone calls have been another ‘rediscovered’ love. Pre-COVID, it was almost bizarre to call someone when you could just text. Now, I welcome phone calls from friends as an alternative to the screen time and Zoom meetings.

How do you think your industry will change post-quarantine? I hope people will have a renewed appreciation for viewing art in person. It’s just not the same seeing it on screen. This moment has demonstrated how important the digital age is, but also how critical real-life experiences are in terms of meaningful connection.

I’m sure we will see a shift in content and what people want to see. There are likely to be logistical modifications to experiential and interactive works. My exhibition at the Arab American National Museum includes an installation that relies on visitors physically engaging with it. I’m working on a contingency plan that involves handing out gloves and the use of a docent that monitors and disinfects surfaces, so visitors can experience the work as intended.

What’s your biggest fear going forward? That we won’t learn what we should from this. Many of those who were already the most vulnerable and undervalued are the ones keeping the country going. Undocumented workers – who, in most states, will not qualify for stimulus aid – are working in places like grocery stores, restaurant kitchens, and produce farms. The fact that their health is disproportionately at risk yet they are unable to receive government aid is absurd. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

What will be your biggest takeaway? It feels too premature to answer that question. I’m still processing. So much is happening, I don’t think any real reflection will come until life resumes to some version of a new normal.

What’s your mission? To use my practice to be honest, learn, and ask questions. If there is no risk in the work, or it lacks an element of discomfort, it’s usually flat. I have to continually ask myself, why am I doing this?

Thinking about the future, I would love to be in a position that enables me to support change in this field. The art industry is still opaque with much less regulation than say, the music industry. This breeds inequity in so many ways and people don’t always get credit or are not fairly compensated for what they do.

Last words? “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” – Arundhati Roy.

Portraits by Daniel Archer. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Hyperallergic April 28, 2020

Reveling in Female Interiority and Soft Power Yasmine Nasser Diaz’s solo exhibition, soft powers, establishes a tension between opacity and transparency via her creation of an interactive bedroom space.

DEARBORN, Michigan — Yemeni-American artist Yasmine Nasser Diaz has been playing with the intimacy of bedroom installations for some time now. soft powers, her first solo museum exhibition, at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn — a part of the Detroit metropolitan area that is home to the largest Arab population in the US — features an a continuation of her Teenage Bedroom series, as well as a set of figurative works burned into velvet. The previous iteration in the series was developed during a 2019 residency at Habibi House in Detroit, and featured direct representations and documents from Diaz’s efforts to extricate herself from her biological family, in defiance of their intention to force her into a marriage arrangement against her will.

The velvet portraits are taken from photographs featuring tween and teenage Yemeni girls, each comfortable in their own company. While the archetype for youthful female friendship in the US is fraught with mean girl tropes, common cultural practices of Yemeni immigrant populations often place young girls and women under restrictive and punitive surveillance, making the solace OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

of female companionship sometimes the only space held for them to be at ease. These portraits are captured and relief-burned into rayon-based velvet, a material which Diaz employs to reference the 1990s (her own teenage years), as well as the Yemeni style of dress known as a dir’ — a kind of partially transparent caftan worn by married women.

These works establish a tension between opacity and transparency, reveling in female interiority by introducing a bedroom scene, set behind a wall to form a distinct space in the gallery. Visitors are invited to explore the space: lift the rotary phone to hear pre-recorded messages and fictional diary readings meticulously constructed (in collaboration with artist Randa Jarrar) that tell the story of two teenage sisters, each grappling with her own set of issues around identity and individuation.

Soft power, as Diaz defines it, deals with the ability to “attract and co-opt,” rather than to act by direct force. Likewise, soft powers does not dictate a message, but opens a space for exploration and empathy, asking visitors to feel their way through terrain that is perhaps foreign, or perhaps jarringly familiar.

soft powers was scheduled to remain on view from March 28 to September 6 at the Arab American National Museum (13624 Michigan Avenue, Dearborn, MI). Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, an online opening and walkthrough with the artist took place on Saturday, April 11, and is accessible on the museum’s YouTube and Instagram. The exhibition was curated by Elizabeth Barrett Sullivan. Diaz is an AANM 2020 Artist-in-Residence and Commissioned Artist. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Refinery29 August 8, 2019 15 Of Our Favorite Contemporary Artists Get Real About Making It In The Art World Looking for something fun to do on a Saturday afternoon that isn’t Netflix and Seamless but also doesn’t require you to don full-body sunscreen? Consider the art gallery. You don’t have to live in New York to gallery-hop — there’s plenty of great art to be seen in cities big and small — and the best part is, unlike museums, art galleries are free and often feature work from younger artists. Oh, and don’t be scared if that painfully chic front desk girl doesn’t immediately greet you. She’s probably just really busy!

Whether you dig sculpture, painting, digital art, or you’re not really sure what you like yet, there are plenty of incredible female artists to put on your radar. They're using their platforms to address issues like race, gender, immigration, and inequality, as well as making work that's beautiful, fresh, and fun to look at.

Also, few fields are as difficult to make it in as the contemporary art world — particularly as a woman, and especially as a woman of color. But that hasn't stopped the women on this list, who are photographers, painters, sculptors, installation artists, and more, from making a lasting impression.

They may not yet be household names, but they're popping up at galleries, festivals, and museums — not to mention Instagram feeds —around the world, not to mention stopping us mid-scroll on our Instagram feeds. They're the next generation of creators, and we picked their brains on everything from influences to career highlights to what to do when the well of inspiration runs dry. Yep, turns out that even happens to budding artistic geniuses. Who knew? OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Yasmine Diaz Raised in Chicago to Yemen-born parents, multimedia artist Yasmine Diaz's work is all about interrogating tensions surrounding religion, gender, and third-culture identity, mainly through personal archives and found images. Her work is able to express things that language often fails at. Consider, for example, her series that addresses the current conflict in Yemen. One collaged image presents a chic marble bathroom next to a house reduced to rubble, another shows a kitchen table next to a cloud of smoke and fire. They're not always easy to look at, but that's kind of the point.

Diaz has work in LACMA's permanent collection, a feat she calls her greatest professional achievement to date. "I made new work for five group shows and two collaborative projects this year," she says. "I'm really looking forward to organizing my studio and doing research for the next phase of work." OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Hyperallergic April 24, 2019 Yemeni Artists Reflect on Their War-Torn Homeland In a Beirut exhibition, artists displaced by the civil war in Yemen broaden our collective understanding of one of the 21st century’s most dire humanitarian crises.

BEIRUT – The front page of a newspaper dated August 10, 2018 is pinned to a wall. The articles have been cut out and the newspaper’s name removed so that the sheet is completely blank and devoid of content other than the date. Yasmine Diaz’s “August 10, 2018” (2018) is a comment on a Los Angeles newspaper’s complete lack of reporting on the airstrike that hit a school bus in Dhayhan, Northern Yemen the previous day, resulting in 50 civilian deaths, many of them children, from bombs made by US weapons manufacturers.

Diaz, who lives in Los Angeles, is one of six artists from Yemen and its diaspora featured in On Echoes of Invisible Hearts: Narratives of Yemeni Displacement. Curated by Lila Nazemian and on view at STATION, a cultural center in Beirut, the exhibition reflects on how image-making, reporting, and archiving shape our collective understanding of war.

Though none of the artists reference Lebanon explicitly, the exhibit draws connections between Lebanon and Yemen by alluding to the fact that both Arab nations have been rocked OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM by civil wars. And, as mammoths like Lamia Joreige, Walid Raad, and Akram Zaatari have emerged as the “war generation” of Lebanese artists, this Beirut show paves the way for artists directly affected by the war in Yemen to create their own footprint.

Focused on archiving and memory, the exhibition is heavy on film and photography. Rahman Taha’s film “Mr. Ali” (2019) documents the experiences of the oldest man working on a farm in the mountains of Northwestern Yemen. “Ali” describes the farmer’s experiences of civil war — both now and during the 1994 Yemeni Civil War — and how it has changed his relationship to the earth.

Similarly, artist Ibn Seera looks at societal changes in Yemen since the 1990s. “(de)Constructed Heritage” (2019) is a research-based video work that follows the artist’s computer screen as he goes through images on his desktop picturing alterations made to the traditional architecture in the port city of Aden, including mosques, schools and mashrabiyas. The video subtly reflects on the desire to maintain and restore these landmarks instead of rebuilding them. Exhibited in a city that has become famous for knocking down historic buildings damaged by civil war and replacing them with modernist structures, the work highlights poignant similarities between Aden and Beirut.

In “Untitled” (In Search of Lost Photographs)” (2018), artist Thana Faroq attempts to recreate a lost archive of snapshots she took of her neighborhood and the people she grew up with in Sana’a, the largest city in Yemen, before leaving in 2016. Superimposed with soundscapes of Sana’a, the resulting hazy footage of 18 rotating images illustrates the mutability of memory and the struggle to preserve the past.

Arif Al Nomay’s “Corrupted Files Series” (2014-2018) is also based on photographs taken during the artist’s last visit to Yemen, during the Sana’a Summer Festival in 2014. The digital files were all corrupted, resulting in the images bleeding into one another. Printed small-scale, the images have been distorted by an all-consuming glitch, serving as an oblique visual metaphor for Yemen’s recent past and current state. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

With an added focus on Yemenis in diaspora, Yasmine Diaz and Alia Ali comment on a Yemeni-American experience. Alia Ali’s “UNDER THREAD” (2019) is presented within a binder of articles that the artist has been collecting about Saudi Arabia bombing Yemen since the war started in 2015. Immersed within the cuttings — which viewers are encouraged to flick through — are black and white self-portraits of Ali’s face tightly bound in thread. The images illuminate the artist’s internal conflict as an American citizen paying taxes that contribute to wars in her home country, leaving her feeling trapped and helpless. Ali’s “Jenaza” (2019), an installation of 42 sets of folded white cloth laid out on the floor of the exhibition space, replicates an Islamic burial tradition, serving to commemorate the lives of those who were killed in the Dhayhan bombing last August.

The exhibition concludes with Yasmine Diaz’s collages, “Averting is Easy” (2018) and “Fools Gold” (2019), which, like “August 10, 2018”, confront the American media’s coverage of the war in Yemen. “Averting is Easy” is an explosion of articles written since the war started, illustrating the scarce coverage of one of the 21st century’s most dire humanitarian crises. The exhibition catalogue references an article in Salon, which reported that MSNBC did not mention the war in Yemen once during the same one-year period in which it aired 455 segments on Stormy Daniels.

Along similar lines, “Fools Gold” is a gold leaf-covered graph comprised of newspaper cuttings. It charts how US media outlets started paying more attention to the war in Yemen following the murder of Jamal Khashoggi — an elite Saudi journalist critical of the Saudi regime — and then resumed ignoring the war after reporters moved on from Khashoggi’s death, suggesting that the US only cares about the war in Yemen when it affects US-Saudi relations.

On Echoes of Invisible Hearts challenges viewers to question how the media determines what we see and don’t see. By creating their own visual archives, and illustrating the complex relationships Yemeni citizens have to their war-torn homeland, these artists attempt to fill the holes in our collective understanding of the conflicts playing out around us. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

The Neighborhoods 2019 In the shadow of the Motown Museum, another kind of studio emerges Habibi House provides a space for artistic freedom, residency

Detroit is a hub for accessible art, whose output doesn’t stop at the museum district. Habibi House, in the Henry Ford neighborhood, is the brainchild of photographer and curator Noura Ballout, who also co-owns The Bottom Line Coffee House in Midtown. It’s a studio and residency space set on a residential street where Ballout invites residents to come and “reimagine home together.”

As a photographer, Ballout said that their goal for a long time was to have an artist residency program because they wanted to bring artists together and cultivate deep relationships with the people they’re working with. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Doing this meant that they’d need to find somewhere that felt like a home, which they eventually found here in Henry Ford, which lies in the shadow of the hospital named for the auto baron, Northwestern High School and the Motown Museum. When Ballout was looking for a studio space for their photography, they knew that it “needed to be more than just a corner of a building where I’m making work.”

“It looked like a good place to do this project in,” they said. “It’s important for me to connect with my neighbors as well. The thing that I want to do is take the things that people in the neighborhood enjoy doing and do that with them.” That’s what Habibi House’s current exhibit Dirty Laundry – created by Chicago artist Yasmine Diaz – built on at its opening on May 17.

Dirty Laundry is Diaz’s critique of adolescence, “religion, gender, and third-culture identity through a lens of a U. S. born Yemeni-American girl.” The installation is an interactive recreation of her teenage basement bedroom as a place of refuge from her religious upbringing and the typical teenage angst that comes with young adulthood.

“It was a big deal because we had the whole space to ourselves, and it was kind of like having our own apartment. And that was really significant at the time because in our family (and) community, upstairs we had guests over a lot,” Diaz said. “But as young women we had to kind of watch ourselves and not sit improperly, not speak out of turn, and downstairs we didn’t have to worry about any of that stuff. We had total autonomy. We could play music, dance, gossip. We didn’t have to worry about how we behaved – basic teenage girl stuff.”

For Ballout, the installation reflected some of their own work that explores identity.

“A lot of my work is about being an artist and a person in a diaspora,” they said. “And also, being queer and trans. One of the biggest difficulties for me was interacting with white people and Americans and…their expectation of the way I should be. (Navigating) that and their assumptions that ‘How could you be all of those things?’”

Ballout plans to have a local artist cohort where four artists come together for dinner weekly at Habibi House and host an event during their residency during the summer. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Sagittarian Matters February 15, 2019

Episode #147-YASMINE DIAZ & AKINA COX!!! Talking about secrets, estrangement, cults, religion, zines & MORE.

Today we are over the moon to welcome artists Yasmine Diaz & Akina Cox to the show on the occasion of their new zine, "Sleepwalking Towards the Exit". We talk about religion, estrangement, cults, representation, insular conservative communities, safety, imposter syndrome and MORE!

You can hear them read THIS SUNDAY at Other Books in Boyle Heights (otherbooksla.com) , or order their zine: https://franklinpress.bigcartel.com/product/sleepwalking-towards-the-exit OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Los Angeles Times July 12, 2018 Datebook: Shots of old Route 66, dreamlike paintings and garments fashioned from paper

Yasmine Diaz, “Exit Strategies,” at Women’s Center for Creative Work. The artist is known for employing drawing, collage and mixed media works in room-sized installations that explore personal and family histories. For her residency at WCCW, she has focused on adolescence, a period in which individuals are wrestling with questions of identity and independence, a tumultuous moment in which childhood and adulthood intersect. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

The Coastal Post July 26, 2018

Yasmine Diaz - Exit Strategies at The Women’s Center for Creative Work

Though we were all far from our teenage years, the opening felt like a house party your friend throws in high school when their parents are away. Yasmine Diaz’s installation, Exit Strategies, encourages this long forgotten youthful behavior. We all crammed into the small room clutching our beers reminiscing under the hot pink glow of the Arabic neon sign. I sat cross-legged on the carpeted foor spilling over a vintage trapper keeper flled with highlighted pages, not of algebra homework, but consisting of the “Multi-agency practice guidelines: Handling cases of Forced Marriage”. During Diaz’s residency at the Women’s Center for Creative Work, she transformed this white-walled space into a replication of the basement bedroom she once shared with her sisters. The installation lures you in with its glowing neon light and Love’s Baby Soft scent and then interrupts your nostalgia by revealing pieces of Diaz’s journey as she escaped the threat of honor violence. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

The dominant element of Diaz’s installation is the bright pink neon light. The color quickly becomes a natural element of this retro space but there is much to unpack in this glowing sign. Diaz provides guidance for those of us who cannot read Arabic, “The text in Arabic is matronymic with my mother’s name and the name I had before I changed it to Yasmine.” Rather than following the traditional “daughter of ” naming structure, Diaz has disrupted that patronymic framework to read the “daughter of ”. This act speaks to Diaz’s rebellion against the patriarchy and her willingness to challenge a culture she was born into as a Yemeni-American brought up in a Muslim home.

It should be said that I feel the heavy weight that comes from discussing the topics of Diaz’s installation. Yasmine and I have spent many hours discussing the ideas behind her work and, as I type out these words, I feel the fragility of that conversation magnifed. This is the bravery that runs through her practice; she is not shying away from a conversation that involves religion, identity, and gender politics. It may feel uncomfortable to be critical of a religion that is also being unfairly persecuted by our country during this surge of xenophobia yet it also seems wrong to dismiss the gender inequality that can be extracted from that religious ideology. This conversation is made more poignant by its display at the Women’s Center for Creative Work. The cross-section of feminism and conservative Islamic tradition is a space that empowers the hijab but doesn’t necessarily ask questions about how that tradition and other more restrictive practices are carried out. Diaz’s installation and the WCCW are taking the steps to engage in this difcult conversation by creating a space that welcomes that dialog.

That conversation fnds a safe home in the transformed residency space. The familiar wood paneling and mustard hues are cradling a muted carpet and retro furniture. The two wallpaper patterns are striking. One side obviously bought and pasted, the other hand-painted with a pattern that is trying to say something more. Those hand-painted 12-point rosettes reference a style of Islamic geometric tiling which continue of the wall and into the intricate paper cuttings that inhabit the framed collages. The source images used for those collage pieces echo the environment we fnd ourselves in; a place where young women can let down their guard. But this carefree attitude must be read through the young women’s body language since their faces have been removed. This omission serves as another act of disruption and an act of protection when placed in the context of the framed documents scattered around the installation.

These redacted documents are precious in their creation and harrowing in their journey. What you are able to glean from these email exchanges is that Diaz escaped her childhood home under threat of retaliatory violence as a result of refusing to enter an arranged marriage. This story is illuminated through these correspondences that document Diaz’s attempt to obtain a legal passport after using a false social security number and a false birth certifcate while in hiding.

Diaz’s installation is being presented this quarter under the “Control” programming at the Women’s Center. Yasmine has fought against the controlling elements in her life since her OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

time in the basement. In the corner of her installation, you’ll fnd a pair of shorts clipped to a long skirt, a revealing glimpse into her daily defance against this imposing control. There is so much courage in this work. The courage to fee her home at a young age, the courage to reveal her false identities, and the courage to revisit that basement with us, the viewer. When I was leaving the opening, I asked Yasmine how she felt about the evening and what it was like to see all these people in her installation. She mentioned how she rarely invited friends over to her room growing up. This installation allowed her to fulfll this childhood desire as she continues to assert her control.

Feminist Magazine Radio Interview June 19th, 2018

FM June 19: SophieBHawkins / ‘Exit Strategies’ / ‘Narcolepsy’ This week on Feminist Magazine with hosts Lynn Harris Ballen & Kiyana Williams :: FIRST … This Pride month, Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter/musician, Sophie B. Hawkins joins Sheri Lunn to talk about her fight for artistic integrity, the lack of support from her record label surrounding both her Grammy nomination and her sexual orientation, and shares a twist on a long held story about her nude photos published in Interview Magazine. Sophie flips the script on how men are not always the antagonists in borderline #metoo scenarios. THEN … We talk to Sarah Williams, Managing Director of the Women’s Center for Creative Work, and artist Yasmine Diaz about her summer residency at WCCW. Exit Strategies – Yasmine’s installation room – recreates the basement bedroom she had as a teen in Chicago — a place of refuge and privacy and a space that also represents a period when she struggled with the expectations of her religiously and socially conservative Yemeni-Muslim family. And we hear how the residency creates a space for dialogue amongst women of marginalized communities who have been discouraged from speaking out against patriarchal oppression AND … Cherise Charleswell talks to author, director, and playwright, Dr. Sikivu Hutchinson, about her sci-fi play – Narcolepsy, currently onstage at the 2018 Hollywood Fringe Festival. The play takes us to a theocratic state where sleep and dreams are policed and manufactured by the multinational, Narcolepsy, Inc. and the ‘Dreammaker’ or Chief scientist – a queer Black woman – is under house arrest for selling company secrets. All this on Tuesday at 2, on KPFK. What Feminism Can Sound Like. Produced by: Lynn Harris Ballen. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Artillery Jul 11, 2018

Just inside the house comprising the Women’s Center for Creative Work is a cozy den that, except for its moody lighting and nostalgic decor, seems to fit right into its residential setting. Though appearing to have long existed in its current furnished state, this room was a white-walled gallery before Yasmine Diaz transformed it into her poignant installation, “Exit Strategies,” recreating her teenage basement bedchamber. Attendants encourage you to make yourself at home, to spray perfume bottles, play tapes, and rummage through her drawers and binders. Yet the deceptively comfortable bicultural bedroom portends a bleak scenario. Though born in America, Diaz wasn’t afforded America’s basic rights. Her installation represents the chamber where she plotted her escape from a dire fate as her socially and religiously oppressive Yemeni Muslim parents sought to coerce her to marry against her will. Framed e-mail fragments bespeak Diaz’ desperate entreaties for help, divulging her precariousness under “threats of extreme violence if arranged marriage is refused.” Governmental assistance was not easily obtained: a chilling 2004 e-mail indicates that changing her identity in order to avoid being stalked or possibly murdered would be an arduous long shot “particularly given our country’s current severe case of xenophobia.” The suppressed story disclosed through Diaz’ intricate installation seems dramatic but reveals that forced marriage is a practice more common than one might think, oft ignored by discriminatory authorities. In her collages, face-ablated figures float amid fragmentary backgrounds of white paper and Islamic patterning, silently soliciting speculation: How many, like Diaz, shoulder pasts regretfully obliterated in order to exist freely? How many Americans suffer connubial immurement—or worse? OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

Hera Collective December 19, 2017

Hera: You in 3 words Yasmine: Crafty. Aggressive. Honest Favorite part about your craft Lately, it's exploring new territories and ditching the comfort zone. Most difficult part Getting personal. I recently did an autobiographical series for the first time, prior to that I had never talked my background in my work. I grew up knowing an arranged marriage I was to have no choice in was in my future. I refused to accept that fate but I ended up being estranged from most of my family for years. It was both terrifying and liberating to finally share this in my work. What you like about working with your chosen medium/materials Working with collage has really loosened my practice. When I was oil painting, my process was much more deliberate and intentional. There's something about collage work that has made me feel less attached to materials and therefore allowed for more spontaneity in the process, something I very much needed. OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

The Jealous Curator July, 7, 2018

Prince, Madonna, and misogyny … well, you know this is going to be interesting. This is the gorgeous mixed media collage work of LA based artist Yasmine Diaz, from a series titled “One Way Or Another”. It is beautiful and intense, and with that I’m going to hand it over to Yasmine to explain:

“This series of collage and mixed media works on paper is inspired by the 3 months Diaz spent in Yemen when she was 15. Fragmented memories are reconstructed with imagery collected from magazines, books, personal archives, and online research. Having only known the streets of Chicago, the experience of traveling to Yemen was a surreal contrast of the worlds she was still struggling to make sense of. As a teenager in the 90s, MTV was a daily priority. Artists like Salt-N-Pepa unapologetically affirmed that a woman’s sex life OCHI WWW.OCHIGALLERY.COM

is “None of Your Business,” while Madonna boldly claimed her independence and sexuality. Their defiance left a mark on a teenage girl covertly rebelling against the misogyny of her family and community.

In the highlands of Yemen, everyone knows everyone’s business and then some. It was there that Diaz learned, via gossip, who she was arranged to be married to. It was also there that she resolved to eventually escape the fate of a forced arranged marriage and a life of oppressive misogyny and limited freedom.”