Alyssa Pheobus
Alyssa Pheobus
Workspace Program Resident 2009
My work often marks the intersections of language, craft and devotional labor — a set of interests that the Dieu Donné workspace residency nurtured from the start. The Comber, the main focus of my work during the residency, began as a series of experimentations in which a single translated line from a Sufi devotional poem was rendered in pulp many times using large, hand cut stencils and a stark palette evoking chalk on a blackboard. I was drawn to the phrase — the comber draws out the beloved’s hair with her fingers — because it suggests the intimate repetition of the act of combing through strands of hair as well as combing understood as a kind of search. I also came to think of this untangling, organizing, trail-leaving notion of combing as being intimately related to drawing itself.
In the studio, Steve Orlando has a knack for sizing up your strengths and inclinations while constantly challenging you to push beyond them. With the help of his expertise and encouragement I quickly adapted to new materials and processes that have opened up my visual vocabulary and transformed my relationship to the handmade. Recently, after seeing six panels from the Comber series installed together as one large work, a friend remarked that collaborating with Dieu Donné had upped the ante in my relationship with labor in art. I hope to carry this lesson forward into new projects.
— Alyssa Pheobus, 2009
In the Studio
About the Artist
Alyssa Phoebus-Mumtaz received her BA from Yale University and an MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Mumtaz’s work is exhibited and collected internationally, and has been included in solo and group presentations in Karachi, Lahore, Mumbai, New York, Palma, London and Dubai. In 2018 two of her early song text drawings entered the permanent collection of the Seattle Art Museum. In 2017 a large installation of her recent projects was presented in "The Language of Objects," a three-person museum exhibition at the University of Buffalo Art Galleries. Her work has also been shown in art fairs including Miami Art Basel (2011), the India Art Fair (2015, 2011) and Art Dubai (2014).
Her projects have been supported by grants and fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, MASS MoCA, the Kittredge Fund, the Lighton International Artist Exchange Program, the Mid Atlantic Art Foundation, Dieu Donné, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Neiman Center for Print Studies at Columbia University. She has taught widely in university art programs in the US and Pakistan and has participated in artist residencies in the US, India, Ireland and Spain. She lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts. (Source: Artist’s Website)
For more information, please visit their website: https://www.alyssapheobus.com