Chandler Wigton, our Associate Director of Events & Studios visited Aziza in her studio to learn more about her and her practice!
Aziza Murray has been a studio artist at Harwood since 2018. We recently sat down with her for an in-depth conversation about her work and inspirations. Aziza grew up in Washington, DC and as a child would draw, collage, sketch, and doodle as a way to process things happening in her life. She encountered loss at a very early age with the passing of her dad when she was seven years old. Art helped her process feelings of grief and confusion. Her parents were creative and encouraging, her dad being an actor and her mom working briefly as a photographer and photographer’s assistant. At a young age Aziza started taking pictures of friends and everyday life, first with a polaroid camera, then a 35mm point and shoot. Aziza studied photography in undergrad at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC, earning a BFA in 2009. She then went on to get an MFA in photography from the University of New Mexico, finishing in 2015.
What new art are you working on currently?
What is your process?
Some of the themes that flow through Aziza’s work include loss, grief, nostalgia and beauty. She is working primarily with photo-based mediums, both digital and analog processes, as well as drawing. Process and concept are intertwined in Aziza’s work. One series that she is currently working on is called Ars Moriendi, or the Art of Dying. It’s a series of scans of dead birds that she has found. It started while she was at an artist residency in Oregon, where birds kept flying into the windows where she was staying. Sometimes they lived, and other times not. Sometimes she would pick them up and nurse them back to life if they were just stunned. The reason they were scanned images rather than photographs is because of the tactile nature of connecting the subject directly to the technology capturing its image. Aziza said that to her it seems wrong to see a dead bird on the ground, that they should just vanish or turn to dust midair when they die. The series is an ongoing work in progress. The images themselves are light and seem to counter the weight of earth’s gravitational pull. The birds are memorialized in a ritualistic way and it is a way of processing grief.
One other project that was started while on a residency in Urubamba, Peru, involved experimentations with text. She used drawing, stencils, and color to explore the word “American” and all its related permutations and what it means. It stemmed from the idea that everyone living in North, Central and South America is an American, and that people from the United States have taken ownership over the word in a way that doesn’t express its full meaning, or its multitude of meanings.
Finally, Aziza also makes tintypes, which is an antique photographic process that involves making direct positives on thin pieces of metal. The tintype method was developed in the 1850s and was a cheaper alternative to the daguerreotype, a process where mercury was used to develop images on glass plates. Aziza appreciated the more democratic tintype method and focused her MFA thesis on the blending of the contemporary technology of digital photography and Instagram, with the antique printing process of tintypes. To see images from her series Tinstagrams, click here: https://www.azizamurray.com/index#/tinstagrams
What is inspiring you?
Film is a big inspiration, as well as beautiful cinematography. For example, Jordan Peele’s Nope was impactful for its visual storytelling and for the ways minorities were presented in ways that they often aren’t portrayed in mainstream culture. Photography is a big inspiration, of course, specifically the work of Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Sally Mann and Mickalene Thomas. The paintings of Titus Kaphar and the interdisciplinary work of Whitfield Lovell have made a big impact on the way Aziza thinks about process. The video works of Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, specifically his piece “The Visitors,” have contributed to Aziza’s interest in video work, a medium she has only briefly explored.
What music have you been listening to lately?
Aziza listens to a wide variety of music but immediately cited folk music as a genre that is important, for the way that it embodies the past, and passes musical traditions down through the generations. She listens to folk, roots, and traditional music from all over the world. Johnny Flynn, Fleet Foxes, and Nick Drake were three artists that are major pillars in her folk music pantheon. Aziza recently discovered the music of the Tuareg-fronted band Tamikrest, close in genre to another Tuareg band she likes called Tinariwen. Some other artists and musical genres include James Blake, SZA, Cumbia, Salsa, Cuban jazz, and the Danish String Quartet. She regularly attends classical music concerts at Chatter, where she serves as board secretary and sometimes as a barista.
Do you have any exhibits or exciting projects coming up that you want to share, or past exhibits you want to highlight?
Right now, Aziza is picking up where she left off with the untitled text project begun in Peru, as well as the bird images. She is also beginning a tintype still life and portrait project inspired by Dutch still life and vanitas paintings. Aziza will be participating in the April 2025 Harwood Open Studios night as well as a group show at the Harwood in the summer of 2025.
To see more of Aziza’s work, visit: http://www.azizamurray.com/