OPENING THURSDAY April 19th
Tariqa Waters
Feast Art Gallery welcomes Seattle based artist Tariqa Waters. Please join us Thursday, April 19th from 6-9PM for the opening reception.
Kitchen Table
In conjunction with her upcoming exhibition at NAAM, “100% Kanekalon…The Untold Story of the Marginalized Matriarch”, Tariqa Waters presents a personal, multi-dimensional excerpt called, “Kitchen Table".
Bio
Tariqa Waters is a Seattle based contemporary visual artist, gallerist, and educator. Born in 1980 in Richmond, Virginia, she was raised with artists in her family and developed an early interest in oil painting. Self-taught, she started working as a muralist while in Sicily where she lived from 2003-2007. Returning to the States, she began creating and showing her own work in Washington DC and later in Atlanta where her paintings were included in group shows at Woodruff Art Center and at Stewart McClean Gallery.
Tariqa relocated to Seattle in 2012. Settling into a unique live/work loft in the historic Pioneer Square neighborhood, she decided to turn the entranceway into a gallery/art space which she called, Martyr Sauce. Initially conceived as a conceptual art experiment, Tariqa soon began inviting artists to show in the space who hadn’t necessarily found commercial viability for their work, but whom she felt had something to contribute. The idea seemed to resonate and the community took notice.
Waters’ own work also began to get noticed and in January of 2014, one of her pieces was selected for the cover of The Stranger newspaper and her large-scale oil painting entitled, “Old Hickory” was selected as the centerpiece for The Seattle Women’s Convention at the Hedreen Gallery. Group exhibitions soon followed at Vermillion, Washington Hall, and at Art of the City Festival. That summer, Tariqa was asked by the city to create an installation across the street from Martyr Sauce in Occidental Park. The exhibit, entitled “No I in Self” filled the park and, enduring vandalism, reemerged and remained on view the entire season. She ended the year with an installation at Seattle Art Museum as part of their Pop Departures and City Dwellers exhibit. Entitled, “Not Again”, the interactive mural was up from October through to February of the following year. 2015 saw Tariqa’s work on another cover of The Stranger and she was featured on the cover of City Arts Magazine for their annual Future List edition. She also continued to curate exhibits at Martyr Sauce, which had become a popular stop on Pioneer Square’s monthly Art Walk. Waters also created her first solo show, “Punched Out”. Housed at 2312 Gallery, the exhibit ran for three months and saw the artist branch out into graphic art and photography.
As an arts educator, Waters is employed as a teaching artist at Seattle Art Museum. She regularly teaches, lectures, sits on panels, and facilitates activities all over the city.