Edgar Allen Beem – Samira Abbassy: Encountering Cultural Identities–Iranian, British, and American

Samira Abbassy’s personal and artistic odyssey began in Iran, where she was born in 1965, took her to England, where she moved with her family in 1967, and since 1998 has been focused on New York City and the United States. Though her paintings evidence a strong Middle Eastern influence, she brings a world of art historical references to her paintings, some of which have been seen in Maine in recent years.

Abbassy recalls that she was twelve years old and living in Tunbridge, Kent, when she “became obsessed with drawing as a form of escape.”

Though her family returned to Iran every year or two until she was twelve, Abbassy came to feel that her identity was “dictated by a place I’d never really been.”

“There was always a sense of loss to come back and be in a place without family,” she says. “There was only us and the Chinese restaurant owners who were not white Brits.”

Samira and her family were Arabic Iranians but they were often referred to as “Pakis,” because Indians and Pakistanis were the only brown people the Brits recognized. As she began to appreciate how making art, often focusing on eyes and hands, could help her forge an identity, Abbassy also came to appreciate how other artists had seen brown people.

“Frida Kahlo,” she says, “was the beginning of self-portraits of a brown woman. She was a giant.”

Abbassy began her art studies at Maidstone College of Art where she did her foundation course. She then spent a year at Birmingham Polytechnic and ultimately earned her BA at Canterbury College of Art.

She majored in painting and was greatly influenced by a teacher who was interested in Indian miniatures. Through her teacher she learned that painter Howard Hodgkin collected works from the Mughal, Deccani, Rajput, and Pahari courts.

Looking at Indian miniatures was Abbassy’s first encounter with “an alternative to the Western canon and the Eurocentric point of view.”

But the miniatures that spoke most directly to Samira Abbassy came from her own cultural background, the Qajar paintings of Iran that are so rich in idealized portraiture. Qajar court paintings have influenced her work for the past thirty years.

Abbassy sees Qajar court paintings as “slightly naïve and lost in translation. That’s how I see myself.”

For ten years after graduating from art school, Abbassy perfected her distinctive style of updated Qajar painting while living and showing in London. She showed regularly and sold well in London, including works acquired by the British Museum and the British government.

In 1998, Abbassy moved to New York City.

“I never got the same traction in New York that I had in London,” she observes. “It was a struggle until fairly recently.”

In New York, Abbassy became a cofounder of the Elizabeth Foundation of the Arts, a twelve-story building with eighty studios on West 39th St. Elizabeth Stanley, for whom the foundation is named, was her ex-husband’s grandmother. C. Maxwell Stanley was an engineer who made his fortune in office furniture and also founded the Stanley Center for Peace and Security in Muscatine, Iowa.

Abbassy served on the board of the Elizabeth Foundation and now has a life tenancy in the studio building.

The Elizabeth Foundation studio building is also Abbassy’s connection to Maine. Billy Gerard Frank, an artist and filmmaker from Grenada with a studio in the building, exhibits with Elizabeth Moss Galleries in Portland and Falmouth. In 2023, Frank curated a show at the gallery featuring two fellow Elizabeth Foundation artists, Abbassy and Simonette Quamina, an artist born in Canada to parents from Guyana and St. Vincent.

Entitled Unmoored: Deconstructing Narratives of the Self / The Other, the exhibition paired Abbassy’s self-portraiture with graphite drawings by Quamina in a show the gallery described as “Intertwined autobiographical narratives centered around culture, identity, childhood, landscapes, displacement, and exile filtered through the prism of memories collapsing present, past, and future.”

One of Abbassy’s paintings at Elizabeth Moss Galleries, Second Moon #2, was purchased for the Bowdoin College Museum of Art by a group of students piloting a Student Acquisition Program.

Emily Jacobs ’23 coordinates the Student Acquisition Program. She explains that the students saw Abbassy’s paintings online and then visited the gallery to see Second Moon #2, an oil on birch panel of figures with shaved heads swimming beneath an anthropomorphic blue moon.

“Every single student,” says Jacobs, “found a different thread in the piece.”

While Abbassy’s imagery is often very specific (the scene in Second Moon #2, for instance, was inspired by an Iranian woman who died after the Iranian morality police arrested her for incorrectly wearing her hijab, a death that Iranian women protested by shaving their heads), she speaks a universal language of the oppressed such that her art spoke to the experience of the Bowdoin students.

That universal language of self and other, freedom and repression, often has a Muslim accent, powerfully inflected by the halo of fire and many-headed angel associated with Mohamed. Hands, eyes, mirrors and, of course, self-portraits are keys to her visual vocabulary of personal mythology.

“I feed it line and form and it tells me a story about who I am,” says Abbassy of her methodology.

Abbassy had hoped to spend a significant amount of time in Maine, but, in fact, she was only here a few days to attend the opening of her solo show at Elizabeth Moss Galleries (27 June to 30 August). But an invitation to exhibit in Dubai, an exhibition program that will also include Maine’s Gail Spaien, kept her in New York where she has the studio space to work on major paintings.

Should Samira Abbassy eventually find the time to create art in Maine, it will be interesting to see how her Middle Eastern aesthetic translates in a Down East accent.

“Place,” she says, “does change the work.”