Alyssa Sakina Mumtaz is an American artist and educator working at the intersections of abstraction, contemplative practice and craft. Incorporating experimental approaches to drawing, painting, printmaking and textiles, her practice aims to re-center forms of embodied knowledge that bear witness to the multivalence of identity, culture, heritage and belonging. Her visual language is informed by sacred geometry, pattern-based abstraction, ritual, domesticity and caregiving. She works with media including mineral and botanical pigments, handmade papers, woodblock printmaking, etching, artisanal fabrics, leather, tapestry weaving and hand quilting. Her meticulously fashioned artworks radiate from her lived experience as a practicing Muslim while simultaneously communicating aspects of her rural American upbringing and experiences inhabiting and moving between contrasting socio-cultural frameworks. Her subject matter pays homage to the material culture of Muslim belief—prayer rugs, talismanic garments, religious architecture, calligraphy and miniature paintings—as well as traditional American quilts, handloom weaving and the devotional art of the Shakers. Many of her projects build upon unexpected common ground shared between seemingly unrelated traditions—for example, echoes between Islamic geometry and American quilt design, or the paradisal gardens that populate visual eschatologies across cultures. The turning of a string of prayer beads is an apt metaphor for how Mumtaz works: cyclical and self-renewing, her practice continually loops back on itself to revisit images and ideas that have become objects of concentration.
BIOGRAPHY
Alyssa Sakina Mumtaz grew up on a farm in Maryland and is currently based in western Massachusetts. She attended Yale University as a first-generation college student and completed her MFA at Columbia University, where she was a recipient of a LeRoy Neiman Printmaking Fellowship and other scholarships.
In 2023 she was awarded a Teaching Artist Cohort Grant from the Center for Craft. Mumtaz’s creative projects and research have also been supported by grants and fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Mass Cultural Council, Assets for Artists, the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, the Kittredge Fund, the Lighton International Artist Exchange Program, the Mid Atlantic Art Foundation, Dieu Donné, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Neiman Center for Print Studies at Columbia University.
Her work is exhibited and collected internationally and has been included in solo and group presentations in New York, Karachi, Lahore, Mumbai, London and Dubai. In 2018 two of her early song text drawings entered the permanent collection of the Seattle Art Museum. In 2017 a selection of her recent projects was presented in "The Language of Objects," a three-person museum exhibition at the University of Buffalo Art Galleries. Her work has also been shown in art fairs including Miami Art Basel, the India Art Fair and Art Dubai.
Since 2008 she has taught drawing, painting, printmaking and design at institutions including Columbia University, the University of Virginia, American University and George Washington University. She is currently a member of the visiting faculty at Williams College and Skidmore College.
She lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts with her husband, art historian and artist Murad Khan Mumtaz, and two young children, Hadi and Jahanara.
[From 2008 to 2020 her work was exhibited under the names Alyssa Pheobus and Alyssa Pheobus Mumtaz.]