Created in 2024, this large-scale, colorful, abstract, multimedia work on unstretched canvas combines collage, textured paint, drawing, and painting. Collaged elements include narrow rectangular strips of painted canvas sewn onto the hand-dyed surface, a bifurcated drawing of an antique clay pot, faceted golden beads, textured paint, fragments of drawings on paper, and cut-up pieces of previous paintings.
Milad has said of her work, “My artistic practice is motivated by a need to record and tell my own story, and in doing so, assert stories like mine into the collective history. As a child in a multicultural immigrant family, I’ve struggled to connect the history of my Egyptian and Honduran ancestry to my life as an American. My process in the studio models on a personal scale the recording and sharing of my history. I mine Western museums for their ancient Egyptian and Indigenous Central American collections to find my dispersed heritage and reclaim objects by creating a personal visual database and re-appropriating select antiquities into my work… The layered compositions mimic my mixed-cultural upbringing by blending what appears to be disparate imagery, icons, and language. My palette is reminiscent of colors I associate with my grandparents’ home in Honduras, political graffiti in Cairo, and Western pop culture."
Jackie Milad is a Baltimore-based artist whose mixed-media work combines drawing, painting, collage, and textile techniques, exploring symbolism and abstraction. She has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally. She received her MFA from Towson University, Baltimore, MD, and her BFA from the School of Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University, Boston, MA.
This artwork was acquired in 2025 as part of the Skokie Public Library’s new art initiative established with the vision, “to establish a robust and relevant collection of visual art. Building on our artistic legacy, we will invigorate our permanent collection with work that inspires and enlightens, reflects the evolving diversity of our community, provokes further investigation and deeper understanding, and cultivates a culture of art appreciation.”
Located on the First Floor opposite the East Entrance of the library.
Medium: Mixed media on hand-dyed canvas collage
Rights
In Copyright http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Provenance
Collection of Skokie Public Library. Acquired in 2025.
