Jackson Harris is co-founder of Black Women in Visual Art, an art consultancy in Atlanta. That approach appealed to Lauren Jackson Harris, who included Moma in an April 2019 show of Black women artists.
STEVE SCHAEFER FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION “There’s a lot of cleanliness, balance, less is more.”Įxamples of Artist Marryam Moma's work stands in her Alpharetta studio. “With my collages, there’s a discipline and formality of the work that is a learned skill from architecture design,” Moma said. That appreciation fused with Moma’s respect for the works of sculptor Alexander Calder, architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Phil Freelon, who lead the design team of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. She’d come to love the works of legendary photographer and multimedia artist Lorna Simpson and the probing, unsettling work of Kara Walker, especially Walker’s paper-cut series. But in time, after marriage and a move to Atlanta, the medium took on greater importance. Her love of design was rivaled by a love of fashion - she says her older sisters are “ultrafashionable” - and blessed with a model’s form, she moved to New York to pursue a modeling career.ĭuring that time, collage became a way to sometimes unwind or digest what was going on around her. But outside of freelancing a few projects with her mother’s firm, Moma did not go into architecture as a full-time career. So much so, Moma thought she’d become an architect herself and later earned an architecture degree from Temple University. Watching her mother work on projects, Moma said she learned to love the language of architecture. Moma grew up in Nigeria in a Tanzanian-Nigerian family. That sense of balance and order Moma learned from her mother who is an architect. Both collages are set against crisp, white backgrounds, bringing them a sense of intensity but also calm. Beside him the angular canopy of a building entrance reminiscent of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice juts forward.
Across the room, a blanket of stars spill across a collage with Martin Luther King Jr. Moma has tempered his ferocity by surrounding him with tender slips of cream-colored paper that resemble damask. There’s a portrait of Miles Davis in mid-song. Moma’s light-filled studio looking out on her backyard serenity garden is filled with books, cutout images and completed works about to be shipped to collectors.
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