Scenes for Seeing: Environment+Body+Gesture+Time

October 1 – June 30, 2025

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For her residency at SHINE Portrait Studio at Express Newark, artist Dahlia Elsayed has crafted a collection of vibrant objects for users to create immersive settings for art, ritual, movement, and envisioning — intricately patterned rugs, richly colored backdrops, symbolic flags and plush cushions — each with colors, patterns, and symbols drawn from her cultural influences.  Placed in the Main Studio, visitors are encouraged to arrange the props as personal sanctuaries, futuristic ceremony spaces, or alternative historical reenactments.

 

As participants interact with the space and objects, they're prompted to consider: What rituals will we need in the coming years? How can we stay informed by our past while embracing an uncertain future? What personal or communal practices might bring comfort, meaning or connection in turbulent times? 

 

Elsayed sees the project as a catalyst for creativity, introspection, and community building. It invites us to actively shape our future, one image at a time, resulting in artifacts of collective imagining. During Elsayed’s residency, which coincides with Express Newark’s annual theme, RITUAL, she will create new works using this collection of objects, make an installation in Changing Room, and engage with students and community members on their own works. 

 

Dahlia Elsayed uses visual elements of landscape, cartography, and cosmology to make myth pictures for placelessness: visual documents that recount unreliable oral histories and anticipate alternate futures. Her paintings, prints, textiles and installations use a symbolic vocabulary rooted in Southwest Asian & North African decorative traditions - lush, colorful, fantastical, immersive -  that make reference to the actual landscape experiences of displacement over multiple generations of her family.

 

Her work has been exhibited at galleries and institutions throughout the United States and internationally, including the Cairo Biennale, Morgan Lehman Gallery, Robert Miller Gallery, BravinLee Programs, The New Jersey State Museum and The Ford Foundation Galleries. Her work is in the public collections of the Newark Museum, the Zimmerli Museum, Johnson & Johnson Corporation, the US Department of State, amongst others. Dahlia has received awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, Visual Studies Workshop, the MacDowell Colony, Women’s Studio Workshop, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the NJ State Council on the Arts. She received her MFA from Columbia University, and lives and works in New Jersey. Ms. Elsayed is Professor of Humanities at CUNY LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, NY.