Jamilah Sabur

Jamilah Sabur (born 1987) is a Jamaican-born contemporary artist working across different disciplines and issues such as performance, installation, video, geography, identity, and language. Sabur lives in Miami, Florida.

Biography Jamilah Sabur was born in 1987 in Saint Andrew Parish, Jamaica. She received a BFA degree in 2009 in interdisciplinary sculpture from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Baltimore; and an MFA degree in 2014 in visual arts from the University of California, San Diego. In 2019, Sabur's site-specific project for the Hammer Museum at University of California, was celebrated in a combined exhibition opening with visual artist Tschabalala Self.

In an exhibition review by the Mark Jenkins at The Washington Post, in 2020, the artist spoke via email about her relationship to nature. “I spent a lot of time in the desert thinking about how a body navigates space in a philosophical sense. I made ephemeral gestures in the land that later transformed into sculptures and sets to perform in.”

At Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow in 2021, New Orleans, Sabur presented Bulk Pangaea, a video installation commenting on the relationship between Louisiana, Belgium, the Duke of Wellington, Napoleon, and transatlantic trade between Africa and the Americas.

In 2022, she presented a new body of work at a solo show titled The Harvesters in the Bass Museum of Art, Florida, in which she references Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1565 painting of same title.

Exhibitions

2022 Jamilah Sabur: The Harvesters, The Bass Museum of Art, Miami, Florida 2022 Eltanin, Broadway Gallery, New York, New York (solo show) 2021 La montagne fredonne sous l’océan/The mountain sings underwater, Fondation PHI, Momenta Biennale, Montréal, Québec (solo show) 2020 Observations: Selected Works by Jamilah Sabur, University of Maryland Art Gallery, Baltimore (solo show) 2020 Mending the Sky, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans 2019 Hammer Project: Jamilah Sabur, Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles 2018 Jamilah Sabur: The Rhetoric of the Living, Emerson Dorsch Gallery, Miami 2017 If defined, then undefine, Dimensions Variable, Miami (solo show)

Collections Jamilah Sabur's work is included in permanent collections of museums in the US and abroad. New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana The Bass Museum of Art, Florida University of Maryland, Baltimore TD Bank Collection