I work on the relationship between art architecture and society and have been influenced by the experience of living and working in Peru, Japan, England and the United States.

My work is an examination of pejorative societal devices that pronounce positions of racial inferiority and feelings of alienation, providing a context for the dissonance between my Tejano heritage and childhood aspiration to feel “normal” in a white space. I recontextualize family stories in relation to cultural signifiers, social mobility, and ethnic representation to decipher my understanding of our present political climate.

I recombine and recontextualize consumer products, fabricated garments, and kitsch-based craft materials through stacking, dressing, styling, and painting. I draw influences from pop culture, splicing together anything from green/sustainable aesthetics to art-historical references, with a contradictory attitude of irony and sincerity. I make modular arrangements that can be presented in many different ways, either on the body, through performance, in a photograph, or in physical space. I deal with concepts of gender, subversion, and transformation. Combinations are personified as

In my paintings, for over a decade I have utilized Civil War–era photographs to help illustrate my exploration of contemporary issues, both personal and universal. My father’s death when I was sixteen forced me to seriously consider my mortality, which led to a long investigation into my spiritual core and what it means to be human. The work has never been specifically about the Civil War, but I have found the war’s imagery ideal for symbolic storytelling dealing with themes of courage, woundedness, home, ego, and faith.

In this series of paintings, I use the icon of the blackboard to reexamine some of what we know about a group of our most familiar historical figures, myths, and cultural phenomena. Our understanding of this should not stop at what we were told in elementary school.

The content of my recent body of work is fueled by found drawings left by museum visitors. While working as a gallery attendant, I was accustomed to finding strange, unfinished sketches left in the galleries. Abandoned and out of context, these drawings possess a sense of humor but also deep sincerity, as their makers created them while observing works of art in the museum. By reproducing these images through trompe l’oeil–style paintings, I activate a value shift. For example, children’s scribbles no longer exist as an afterthought, they’ve

As an artist who witnessed the waning of my father’s personhood through the dissolution of his memory, I wrestled with conveying the devastating personal and human experience of this loss without relying on visual clichés. The final image in my drawings is largely the result of the pentimenti that have moved the narrative along, without resolving it. Sometimes, the layers of earlier drawings overpower the last, like quicksand under a surface of marks and erasures.

Zina Haydar Al-Shukri combines materials to emphasize the topography of individual people. Her process takes into consideration the notions of transition, conflicts, and hybridity in relation to culture and religion, individuality and shared experience, psychology and social determination. Al-Shukri’s portrait practice provides a psychological “check-in” to create a space for dialogue, illustrating the relationship between the subjects and their experience of social conditions.