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Home > Prizes > Prize Recipients > Iman Issa

Iman Issa

2017 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Fine Arts

Location

New York, NY

Title

Artist

Area(s) of Research

Fine art; photography; painting; drawing; sculpture; printmaking; artist

Education

Columbia University (MFA); University of Washington, Seattle; American University in Cairo (BPh)

Country of Birth

Egypt

Links to learn more about Iman Issa's work
  • imanissa.com

Tags
artist drawing egypt fine art marble mixed-media painting photography printmaking sculpture stone video visual art
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Iman Issa, pictured from the chest-up, stands in a living room in front of two big windows.

Iman Issa thoroughly embodies a 21st-century template of the conceptual artist: first posing knotty philosophical questions, then trying to clarify and work them out through creating objects and installations.

Issa grew up in Cairo in a household that supported analytical thinking, her father a physician and her mother a chemistry professor. As a college student, Issa was initially attracted to philosophy and political science, and completed her degree in philosophy from the American University in Cairo in 2001.

At the age of 19, however, Issa won a scholarship to study at the University of Washington in Seattle, and, in what she describes as “kind of a lucky thing,” was given a job as a guard in the Henry Art Gallery. She didn’t know very much about contemporary art at the time, and was amazed to find that it could accommodate difficult philosophical questions she had been long considering. “All of a sudden I realized that it was a field…where all of the things I was interested in could come together,” she says.

When she returned to Cairo, she immersed herself in making art, through photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, and printmaking. In 2005, Issa was accepted into Columbia University’s MFA program. She became very interested in the question of how to convey one’s personal relationship to places, figures, and events that are collectively familiar. This led her to working with monuments and memorials, and inventing her own as a way to explore how objects made with a personal, subjective vision might have collective use. At the foundation of this work is a query about the difference between experience and recognition.

A wide shot of a white-walled gallery with five stand-alone art pieces dispersed throughout the space.

Her explorations have earned Issa shows in prestigious institutions and numerous awards, and Issa continues to explore how to use objects to communicate to pose the crucial question: How do we recognize what we think we know?

 

Awards and Accomplishments

  • DAAD Artist in Residence Award (2017)
  • Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award
  • Abraaj Group Art Prize (2013)
  • Han Nefkens Foundation-MACBA Contemporary Art Award (2012)
Tags
artist drawing egypt fine art marble mixed-media painting photography printmaking sculpture stone video visual art

Jury Members

2017 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Fine Arts

Nicholas Baume

Director and Chief Curator, Public Art Fund

Naomi Beckwith

Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Rita Gonzalez

Curator and Acting Head of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Hitomi Iwasaki

Director of Exhibitions and Curator, Queens Museum of Art

Thomas J. Lax

Associate Curator, The Museum of Modern Art
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Related Prize Recipients

Meleko Mokgosi

Meleko Mokgosi receives the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Fine Arts for paintings that rely on intensive research, reflection, and conversation in order to address widespread misrepresentation of Africa and Africans, and to accurately portray the continent’s complex social and political realities.
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Carlos Motta

Carlos Motta receives the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Fine Arts for his engagement, through performance, film, and other media, with the question of representation and democracy, the emotional underpinnings of political awareness, and the tension between dominant accounts of history and marginalized communities.
Portrait of Carlos Motta

Nari Ward

Nari Ward receives the Vilcek Prize in Fine Arts for a body of found-object assemblage artwork that invites both a public discourse and an intimate dialogue with viewers on topics such as race, poverty, immigration, and the Caribbean diaspora identity.
Portrait of Nari Ward

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