Zahra Marwan: Pickled Dreams: Torshi and Kurkum

Zahra Marwan’s dreamy watercolors celebrate the colors and textures of desert and sea – the two landscapes that have informed her work and her life.

Her watercolors now reflect both regions: “New Mexico’s mesa is full of color,” Marwan says, “and I use the medium I often work with to depict that.”

Marwan wrote and illustrated her first picture book–Where Butterflies Fill the Sky–exploring the beauty of Kuwait and the confusion and displacement she experienced when her family left the country for the U.S. Her book will be published on March 29 by Bloomsbury, and is “full of images of home.”

In the show, because the paintings were not created primarily for children, her subject matter has also expanded beyond the book’s boundaries. Marwan’s paintings include elements “like the argila water pipe that many old women like to smoke.” Many of Marwan’s paintings revolve around women, who, she says, “are often dismissed and generalized both here and there.”