Sarah Valinezhad
I am an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Massachusetts. My research-driven practice centers on painting, drawing, and narrative image-making, exploring themes of memory, interior space, and feminist experience. Through domestic environments and symbolic visual language, my work examines how personal and collective histories are carried, witnessed, and reactivated over time. My work has been exhibited in museum and juried contexts nationally, including a solo exhibition, In the Garden of the Hunter, at the New Bedford Art Museum. Recent exhibitions include the 8th Louisiana Biennial at Louisiana Tech University, Belonging (15th Annual International Juried Exhibition) at the University of North Carolina, and others. My practice has been recognized by 3×3 International Illustration Magazine and Graphis New Talent. Alongside my studio work, I am an instructor in higher education, where teaching and mentorship inform my approach to art making as an active and reflective process. I understand the studio as a site of emotional labor, attention, and persistence, where making becomes a form of witnessing.
Through my work, I seek to hold space for vulnerability, resilience, and the quiet endurance embedded in everyday life.
Artist Statement
My studio is not a place of separation from life. It is where memory, fear, care, and persistence accumulate over time. I work through painting and drawing as a way of staying present with what cannot be resolved quickly, allowing images to emerge through repetition, hesitation, and physical engagement with the surface.
My paintings center on Iranian women's lived experiences, particularly states of endurance, vigilance, and quiet resistance. While rooted in specific cultural and political realities, the work speaks to a broader and shared condition of oppression, where the body carries fear, responsibility, and care under systems that restrict freedom. Interior spaces function not as descriptive settings but as emotional structures shaped by tension and intimacy. Figures often appear suspended in moments of attention or restraint, holding histories that are both personal and collective.
Process is essential to my practice. I build surfaces slowly through layering, revision, and visible change, allowing the hand to remain present in every decision. I resist polish and automation in favor of touch, slowness, and vulnerability. Painting becomes an act of witnessing rather than representation, a way to hold space for what persists beneath daily life.
What I make in the studio reflects what I am living through. The work is shaped by ongoing political and emotional realities, but it does not illustrate them. Instead, it registers their presence through atmosphere, gesture, and restraint. The studio becomes a site of attention and care, where continuing to paint is itself an act of commitment.
www.sarahvalinezhad.com
