Arab-American, Mary Ann Peters, 2015 Stranger Genius Award Nominee in Visual Art

posted on: Jun 12, 2015

ary Ann Peters has been creating sophisticated abstract watercolors on the soft, smooth surfaces of clay-coated panels for decades. She could have continued doing that into the sunset, encoding her subject matter—her family’s homeland in Syria and Lebanon—by wrapping it in beautiful swirls and cascades of paint. She had good reasons for keeping her subjects partly obscured. First, the art world is only cyclically interested in anything unabashedly political, narrative, female, or minority. Would alluding too directly to Syria and Lebanon get Peters cast as “the Arab American artist”?
But there was another problem, too, a more internal one. Peters, who graduated from the University of Washington with her master’s in fine arts in 1977, was not able to travel to her family’s homeland—ever—until 2012. What compelled her also eluded her. How do you make imagery of what you don’t know and can’t see?

Peters’s North Star has been a piece of paper she keeps tucked away at home. It’s an old family letter she inherited, written to her father by his father. When the younger man was leaving Syria to go to Yale and Eurocentric America, the older man gave his advice in the form of a request: “I know it’s difficult, but please find the Syrian boys.” Find your people. Don’t lose us. That way, you won’t lose yourself.

Source: www.thestranger.com