Alexis E. Lowry /// Interview with Ghada Amer

I recently sat down for tea with Ghada Amer at her home in Harlem NY to discuss her work and her world-view. Amer is best known for her embroidered paintings of women in sexually charged positions, however, she is also a sculptor and earth artists, who explores ideas of feminism, sexual pleasure, translation, and cultural hybridity. Working with ‘craft’ techniques, Amer raises these feminized media to the level of high art by injecting them into the formal language of abstract expressionism. While her work is often labeled with such current terms as feminist and post-colonial, what gives her work depth is the way in which she navigates these categories. She simultaneously occupies and rejects these definitions, presenting objects of transparent occlusion.