Humaira Abid: Searching for Home

Searching for Home is a solo exhibition of Seattle-based, Pakistan-born artist Humaira Abid. This powerful exhibition presents a human-scaled look at the worldwide refugee crisis focusing on the plight of women and girls, who make up a disproportionate percentage of the millions of people who have fled their home countries as a result of political conflict and strife, ethnic cleansing and persecution, domestic abuse, climate change and crimes against humanity. Searching for Home presents works by the artist that were created following months of research and interviews with refugee women who have been resettled in both the Pacific Northwest and Pakistan from nations including Somalia, Syria, and Afghanistan.

Abid’s career-long decision to specialize in woodcarving, a male-dominated field, reflects her commitment to challenging stereotypes. The beauty and mastery of Abid’s to-scale carvings of seemingly benign objects, ripe with subtext, belie the violence, cruelty, upheaval, and instability in society, especially that to which women are subject.