Artist reception,
Opening: JULY 11th 2026 6-9pm
Artist reception,
Opening: JULY 11th 2026 6-9pm
Artist reception,
Opening: JULY 11th 2026 6-9pm
Artist reception,
Opening: JULY 11th 2026 6-9pm
Artist reception,
Opening: JULY 11th 2026 6-9pm
Artist reception,
Opening: JULY 11th 2026 6-9pm
Group show curated by Anaïs Bouchatta
With support from Awa M.M. Kah
July 9th - August 30th 2026
Artist reception,
Closing Aug 30th 2026 12-7pm
Opening: JULY 11th 2026 6-9pm
CURATORIAL STATEMENT:
_JPG.jpg)
Adrar Inu, or ⴰⴷⵔⴰⵔ ⵉⵏⵓ , translates to
'My Mountains' in Tamazight. It is the title and the point of departure for this exhibition. The singer Idir's song "Adrar Inu" speaks about the same views that my mother holds just as dear to her.
The phrase 'I've left my mountains' carries a deeply personal significance for me, rooted in my family's history and in the politics the late Tamazight, Algerian singer wrote about. The song has long resonated within my family, especially with my mother, who is from the mountainside.
The mountains in the song are not simply a skyline of the country, but a large, rigid yet comforting blue on the horizon that encapsulates the feeling of home.
Every body of work carries a story within its creation, its medium, and then again in how it's placed as an object in this world.
The artists gathered here have each made that journey with their medium: across oceans, across languages, across disciplines, and are exhibiting this work at 201 @ 105.
By Hana Ibrahim
Adrar Inu (I've left my mountains)
Adrian Oakley
*Highlighted artist for the week
Artist Statement:
Adrian Oakley is a recent graduate of Stevens Institute of Technology with a background in Visual Arts and Information Systems.
She is an artist who works across mediums to create work that speaks to her lived experiences. Whether through music, visual art, or literary art, everything she creates is a reflection of how she perceives the world.
Adrian is interested in creating pieces and experiences that merge creativity and innovation. In much of her creative work, she centers her identity as a young Black Caribbean-American woman, using that lens to curate unique perspectives and spark meaningful conversation. In this exhibition particularly, she highlights Black and queer aesthetics inspired by Blood Orange's discography.
"Desirée"
19.5’’ X 23.25 (framed)
ADR2026.27
Alyssa Sanchez
*Highlighted artist for the week
Artist Statement:
Alyssa Sanchez is a Puerto Rican artist based in New York City. She has a BFA in Fine Arts from FIT and is also an alumni of Highschool of Art and Design. She is currently a private school art teacher and a fine artist working with other art professionals such as the Collective 27.
Her work could be summed up as a woman’s lived experiences through color and emotion. She creates drawings and paintings of these women in mostly still positions with expressions that include the heavy contemplation women do every day, including herself.
She does draw inspiration from her own life, hugely from her emotions and familiar everyday settings.
Within these paintings are Taino symbols, often in plain sight, related to Borinquen/ Nuyorican culture. Frequently used is the Taino sol, related to her grandmother and the energy of the sun. There is a sense of nostalgia seen in almost every piece. Her palette consists of a plethora of purples, magentas, and reds. On occasion they may dominate her palette but altogether she still balances them out with a range of colors that can add depth to certain expressions.
She is also naturally drawn to textiles and sculpture. She currently makes stained glass sculptures also focused around color and feeling. All of them are smaller works that each feel like a world in their own right. When she is not painting women she is creating elaborate, detailed textile work on rice paper that takes the emotion/color and translates it into a natural organic flow of water. Each piece is a different body of water.
Her work varies widely and she spends most of her time sorting her lived experiences and pouring them into each medium in the hopes of answering lost questions and relieving the weight of strong emotion.
Becoming
Oil on canvas
20” X 16”
ADR2026.09
Ode To
Oil on canvas
20” X 16”
ADR2026.10
Tied Down
Oil on wood, Framed
12.625” X 15.625” X .625”
ADR2026.11
Take Temp
Oil on wood
10” X 8” , 1.625” X 9.625” X .625
ADR2026.12
Concentration
Oil on wood panel, Framed
10” X 8” , 11.625” X 9.625” X .625
ADR2026.13
Amirah Ibrahim
*Highlighted artist for the week
Artist Statement:
Amirah Ibrahim is an American-born, NYC photographer, raised by Ghanaian and Togolese parents of Nigerian Heritage. Amirah is a photographer, visual storyteller, and creative director. She has been in the creative scene for over 5 years, creating meaningful work that revolves around her identity as a Black Muslim woman.
Duality of Black
Color Digital Print
16” X 12"
ADR2026.14
Gargajiyamu
Color Digital Print
16" X 12"
ADR2026.15
Awa M.M Kah
*Highlighted artist for the week
Artist Statement:
Awa M M Kah is a photographer and videographer of Gambian and Senegalese heritage. Raised across nine countries, she found in the arts her main outlet for creative expression, her wide-ranging experiences shaping a deeply personal artistic lens.
It was upon moving to the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa, that Awa first had the opportunity to explore her creativity in a new way. There she launched what would become her first photoshoot, "African Skaterboy," capturing the emerging skate scene on the African continent through a collaboration with a fellow student. The project sparked a deeper inquiry into what it means to create as an African creative. Central to that inquiry is a quote from one of her inspirations, Ousmane Sembene: "L'europe n'est pas mon centre" ~ "Europe is not my center." These words became the core of her practice, directly inspiring her photoshoot "Mon Soleil," in which she centralises African modesty as a Muslim woman herself.
Awa has since graduated Summa Cum Laude from Stevens Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Engineering in Biomedical Engineering. Alongside her individual practice, she is a co-collaborator with the art collective Collectif Defar, extending her work into shared making.
Excerpts from Amdalai (part two)
Color Digital Print
11” X 17"
ADR2026.18
Mon Soleil Pt.2
Color Digital Print
11” X 17"
ADR2026.17
Excerpts From Amdalai (part five)
Color Digital Print
11” X 17"
ADR2026.20
Yaye Boye
Color Digital Print
11” X 17"
ADR2026.21
Mon Soleil
Color Digital Print
11” X 17"
ADR2026.22
Outtakes
Color Digital Print
11” X 17"
ADR2026.19
M&B.1
Color Digital Print
11” X 17"
ADR2026.23
Naaima Abd-Elhameed
*Highlighted artist for the week
Artist Statement:
Naaima Abd Elhameed uses her lens to capture the world around her, paying close attention to light, emotion, and movement as a form of storytelling. Inspired by virtually everything and everyone, she pursues portrait and event photography while finding her greatest excitement in street photography. Her aspiration is to continue taking her camera to all different parts of the world. After all, it's always her and her Sony.
This collection features some of her most cherished street photography to date. From New York and Egypt to Abu Dhabi, the images capture a variety of colors, contrast, and composition, all in service of redefining how we experience the world around us. Each photo was chosen with intention, with the hope that they make you feel something.
Oh, Fayoum
Color Digital Print
16” X 20"
ADR2026.08
Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque
Color Digital Print
16” X 20”
ADR2026.05
Sunset on the Hudson
Color Digital Print
18” X 12”
ADR2026.07
The Feeling of Fayoum
Color Digital Print
12” X 18”
ADR2026.06
M&B.2
Color Digital Print
11” X 17"
ADR2026.08
The African Skater Boy
Color Digital Print
11” X 17"
ADR2026.16
Fatima Sadouki
*Highlighted artist for the week
Artist Statement:
Formally trained in engineering, critical theory, humanities, and science across Stevens Institute of Technology and NYU, Fatima Sadouki finds joy in studying the visual arts. Her practice moves across media to trace the textures of memory and the promises we attach to what comes next—holding nostalgia and techno-optimism within the same frame, letting the warmth of what has passed inform a hopeful reach toward what might still arrive. Inside that tension she examines loss and isolation alongside their quieter counterparts: the joy found in ordinary routine and the deliberate construction of a whimsical, self-authored life shaped by the feminine mystique. Much of this draws on the experience of growing up mixed race and between cultures, where identity is assembled across time rather than simply inherited.
At its center, her work holds a single refusal: resisting the capitalist narrative that frames a life as a fixed trajectory toward a single predetermined end. In its place she offers a model of selfhood that loops, revises, and accumulates meaning—finding the sacred in the mundane and the expansive in the small, healing the inner child and tending a garden for their future.
Cordate
Collage
10” X 8"
ADR2026.26
Distance
Acrylic, mixed medium on canvas
16” X 40"
ADR2026.25
Curatorial Note:
Material memory has always been an interest of mine. There is a voice in travel, a voice in creation that is the same voice I feel when thinking about my voyage and leaving the country I was born in, Algeria, or the town I was born in, and the language I share with only a few, and how this shapes my identity and has shaped everything that came before.
I think of my role as a curator the way I think of an onion plant that keeps getting cut. Each time, something new pushes through, just like the time my family came into a new life despite not being able to bring everything or everyone with them. To grow in spite of the cutting, but because of it. The root holds the ability to grow again. What grows next is made possible by all that was carried by my mother and the mothers before her, beneath their suffering and sacrifice, and without the grounding of soil. We are all alike.
Anyone with a similar story of growth and struggle, even if different in scale. The sense of struggle within the diaspora or migration is not a tale unheard of, as it is not a tale at all. It's the reason as to why I appreciate the togetherness of art, community, and the richness of cultures in New York; there is a community within these themes and within the exhibition's walls.
This show is, in part, about that kind of resilience, but it is equally about the particular joy of working alongside others: of experiencing someone else's practice as an extension of themselves. There is a weaving of similarities and differences at the same time.
The works here are evidence of minds at work and of stories finding the medium that could hold them. To grow up between worlds is to become fluent in translation, the language of noticing.
The artists in this exhibition know this well. They have made it their own, ingrained in their medium and their story.
Anaïs Bouchatta