The Contemporary Persian Rug

Born in Turlock, CA, and now living and working in Albuquerque, NM, Esther Elia is an artist of mixed Assyrian and Irish descent. Her work— spanning sculptural furniture, clothing, and large-scale acrylic paintings—combats the idea that Assyrian art exists only in the ancient past.

Brimming with defiant vitality, Elia’s work draws on history, family folklore, and personal experience to explore what it means to be an Assyrian in diaspora. In this show, her paintings evoke the Persian rug as a lens through which to examine the pursuit of safety.

Elia’s early work drew from oral histories, giving her “a shifting, fuzzy picture of my family’s experiences as survivors of a genocide.” She reflects that they tended to gloss over traumas, focusing instead on triumph: “We made it to the U.S., where we could finally breathe because we were safe.”As conflicts in Iran and surrounding areas were televised, sensationalizing war and destruction, “the effects of the bad press became garments worn by the people from those regions, masks many could not see behind,” Elia says.