Photo of Humaira Abid by Amber Hammad

Searching for Home is the first solo museum exhibition for Seattle-based, Pakistan-born artist Humaira Abid. Abid is well known for her unique visual language, which blends the discipline of traditional Mughal miniature painting and sculpture in wood. Her career-long decision to specialize in woodcarving, a male-dominated field, reflects her commitment to challenging stereotypes. The beauty and mastery of Abid’s to-scale carvings of seemingly benign objects, ripe with subtext, belie the violence, cruelty, upheaval, and instability in society, especially that to which women are subject.

First shown at Bellevue Arts Museum, Searching for Home presents a human-scaled look at the worldwide refugee crisis focusing on the plight of women and girls, who make up a disproportionate percentage of the millions of people who have fled their home countries as a result of political conflict and strife, ethnic cleansing and persecution, domestic abuse, climate change and natural disasters, and crimes against humanity. Searching for Home presents works by the artist that were created following months of research and interviews with refugee women who have been resettled in both the Pacific Northwest and Pakistan from nations including Somalia, Syria, and Afghanistan.

The works in Searching for Home demonstrate the artist’s ability to tread a narrow line between evocative (and often provocative) content and mastery in a material discipline. The Center for Art in Wood’s presentation includes never-before-seen works that reflect the lack of resolution that impacts an increasing percentage of the world’s population. Among them, an interactive piece invites the visiting public to participate in storytelling and the sharing of personal narratives.

Searching for Home was organized by Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, WA.
A publication complimenting the exhibition will be available for purchase.

The exhibition program at the Center is generously supported by members of the Cambium Giving Society of the Center for Art in Wood, the Bresler Family Foundation, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, William Penn Foundation, and Windgate Foundation. Corporate support is provided by Boomerang, Inc., Penn State Industries, and Sun-Lite Corporation. 

Program support for Searching for Home at the Center for Art in Wood is provided by Jane and Joe Goldblum, and the immigration law firm of Goldblum & Pollins.

In-kind support for the exhibition is provided by Helen Williams Drutt English and Lorna and Arnon Dreyfuss.

Humaira Abid: Searching for Home was organized by Bellevue Arts Museum and curated by Jennifer-Navva Milliken. Works in this exhibition were made possible in part by grants to the artist from 4Culture and Artist Trust, with support from Refugee Women’s Alliance (ReWA) of Seattle.