Nimah Gobir
Nimah Gobir is an artist and educator based in Oakland, California. Through paintings and installations, her work explores the nuances and shared experiences of being Black, drawing on text and photo references collected from both family and personal archives.
Gobir completed her undergraduate studies at Chapman University with a B.F.A. in Studio Art and B.A. in Peace Studies. She has an M.Ed from Harvard Graduate School of Education with a focus in Arts in Education. She has shown work at ForYourArt, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, The Growlery, and Root Division where she was awarded the Blau-Gold Studio/Teaching fellowship. Last year, she completed a fellowship with Emerging Artist Professionals SF-Bay Area.
Her projects include The Coloring Book, a coloring book of black women that she produced in 2017 and a participatory coloring installation at the Alumni of Color Conference at Harvard Graduate School of Education. In March 2018, Gobir co-created Non-Sterile Art Happenings, a pop-up art exhibition in a UHAUL truck in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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These paintings are from Old House, a series that explores Gobir’s relationship to homes she lived in throughout her life as she grew up in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. These works explore the artist's relationship to home as a concept, physical dwelling, and feeling.
Many of the paintings draw from archival photos to offer intimate access to bedrooms and living rooms where the artist interacts with her family. Embroidery, used in many of Gobir’s paintings, infuses artworks with feelings of domesticity and comfort. The use of sewing to create repetitive patterns is both mundane and precise, mirroring the way homes take on a banality while being unique to each family.
The title Old House refers to how the artist references all of her past homes– sometimes as a blanket statement: “In my old house…” or by their nicknames: the name of the street, group of condos, or city itself.
