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Current Exhibition
Adnan Charara's "Hueman"
5 March - 2 April 2010
Charara’s exhibit "Hueman" features paintings and sculpture in his signature ‘’cartoon” imagery, using whimsy and a cacophony of colors to comment on our common humanity, injustice, the immigrant experience and much more.
Adnan Charara, born in Lebanon, attended boarding school there, then lived in Sierra Leone during the 1974 civil war in Lebanon. From his studio at the Russell Industrial Center in Detroit he has produced his unique oeuvre of paintings, drawings, cast sculpture, and found object works.
The Arab American National Museum exhibited his art in their first living-artist one-man show. His work is found in public and private collections including that of the Corcoran College of Art & Design in Washington D.C.
Adnan Charara’s sense of humor, his experiences as an immigrant, and his keen perceptions of the world around him inform the work in the exhibition. The found object assemblages and digital prints are both toy-like and ironic. Like a Ballerina (My Mother) gives a gentle grace to the maternal figure made with a rotary beater, cooking and taking care of her family while poised like a dancer en pointe. Likewise, Yes, We Can offers wordplay on the Obama slogan with an oil can and the wings of a butterfly. Revenge of the Nails addresses the rising up of the oppressed.
In his envelope series, Charara examines one’s sense of place. An immigrant, once known to all in the community by his father and his father’s father, is reduced to a cipher, stamps, an address, an entirely new identity into which the old one must be drawn.
The Osmosis series of collages shows a person’s head, painted in Charara’s signature cartoon imagery, being absorbed into many different backgrounds.
The artist’s paintings (Fragile, Return to Sender is also interpreted as a sculpture at the Arab American Museum), depict humanity in all its colorful, chaotic variations, showing us all as Hueman.