Dahlia Elsayed has mapped out her life. Literally. The 41-year-old Arab American painter and writer uses cartography to document and express the cultural markers of her life. The maps she draws are based on concrete locations – Egypt, New Jersey, New York City – but the markers are pure feelings. With a calming blue-green palette and humorous text woven through the images, her paintings have a continuity that makes them read like pages from a book. Over the weekend, I trekked out to Newark to visit Dahlia in her studio and see her solo show at Aferro Gallery:
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