Nia Musiba, Unseasonably Warm

August 8 - September 13, 2024

One Grand Gallery is pleased to welcome back Portland-based interdisciplinary artist Nia Musiba for her second exhibition with the gallery. Unseasonably Warm builds on Musiba's distinct world-building and distills the varied lived experiences of the artist’s past few years into dreamy, tangible works on paper. Stars, flowers, figures, and spirals outline a natural world in primary colors. Dark figures bend and flex and curl, taking shape around the etched forms, becoming one with the tall grasses and the sunshine. Colored pencil as the primary medium on raw edge paper imbues these works with a wild and urgent tactile quality. The narrative they weave is overflowing and as observers, we bear witness to this private story-telling. Glimpses into Musiba’s musings can be spotted as easter eggs tucked between sweeping figures and gestures—swift phrases as mementos of bygone moments. Accompanying these works on paper are several ceramic sculptures made in collaboration with Sara Victorio of Hotel Ceramics.

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This show is a follow up to my first solo with One Grand in 2022, The Impossible Art of Coming Together. For nearly two years, I could sense I was working towards something that hadn’t quite made itself known yet. A few weeks out, it has finally revealed itself to me.

Unseasonably Warm encompasses all that has transpired since my previous exhibition and the often silent, and at times glaringly loud, thread that has weaved itself throughout it all—my first heartbreak and subsequent search for myself; graduating from my undergrad; questioning the meaning of life and finding the answers in friendships and experimentation and new love. This show investigates cycles, completion, repetition, symbols, patterns, freedom, structure, discipline (and lack thereof) coming undone and then coming together again. Unseasonably Warm is about the balance of it all. It is about falling in love again even though it is scary. About saying goodbye to your childhood home. About the time it takes to heal a broken heart. About finding a method to all of the madness. About the strength it takes to regret nothing. It is about coming home to oneself, about yearning for sunshine, the unpredictable nature of an upcoming season, a world full of sweetness, a life of freedom, the endless spiral, the art of wrapping a gift, and the undoing of it all.

Nia Musiba is a multidisciplinary creative based in Portland, Oregon with a lifelong commitment to diversifying art and design spaces. Nia is interested in collaboration, experimentation, question-asking, friend-making, and above all else, dreaming big. She views her depictions of Black and brown bodies as a way to reclaim the tenderness and complexities of her own identity as well as an opportunity to hold space for other people of color who historically have been misrepresented in overly flattened, brutalized, and hyper-sexualized ways within art and media.

Press:

Oregon ArtsWatch
readymag
Variable West Interview—forthcoming


@niamusiba
helloniamusiba.com

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Previous Exhibitions:

Nia Musiba,
The Impossible Art of Coming Together

August 12 - September 2, 2022

One Grand Gallery is pleased to announce The Impossible Art of Coming Together, an exhibition of paintings, mural work and weaving by Portland-based artist Nia Musiba. Curated by Luiza Lukova, the works selected for this show consider a myriad of motifs that ring close to the artist: identity, origin, community, balance, growth, and contrast. Musiba’s work explores Blackness through history, pulling from her own heritage as the daughter of a Tanzanian immigrant. Her canvases are bold and large - pulled towards primary colors and aggrandized depictions of bodies, these pieces hold weight in their details. The inclusion of texture to individual components within her paintings adds a visually stimulating element to the viewing experience. Where one figure receives a slick coat of paint, its counterpart protrudes slightly from the foreground, gritty sand melded with paint creating the illusion of the narratives coming alive and endlessly unfolding.

Hands stretch across canvases, hold flowers, hold space, hold each other. Each work achieves a calming balance, alternating shapes in black and white contort and dance with one another, at times even moving with or through their partner. Just as these imagined personalities extend themselves and reach beyond the constraints of their frames, so too does this evocative gesturing mimic Musiba’s intention to push the work further, to dream even bigger. Each piece hides within its creation an underlay of text born of the artist’s internal drafting process. Painted as the initial base of each work, and subsequently covered in multiple realized coats of paint, these textual complements remain hidden to the visible eye. To unveil a glimpse into this thorough and intimate practice, the gallery will be publishing an interactive zine in tandem with the exhibition.

The Impossible Art of Coming Together challenges artist and viewers alike to find moments of respite - to imagine new avenues for care and familiarity in times that may feel overwhelmingly heavy and burdensome.

Nia Musiba lives and eats and sleeps and goes to school and creates work and makes new friends in Portland. Her identity as a queer Black woman and the daughter of a Tanzanian immigrant continue to inspire her exploration of Blackness throughout history. Her creations are about being human, about hands and feet and bodies and love and sadness and flowers and sunshine. Nia views her depictions of Black and brown bodies as a direct response to the hyper-sexualization, brutalization, and overall negative depictions of BiPoC individuals within art and media.




@niamusiba
helloniamusiba.com

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