Tariqa Waters
Art Mediums: Multidisciplinary/Installation
Born in Virginia, Tariqa Waters is a contemporary artist known for her whimsical larger-than-life fabrications, paintings, self-portraitures and installations. Waters works in varied media- canvas, wood, plastic, ceramics, paint, and photography. Her technicolor characterizations of multigenerational commercial references reclaim an authentic and sincere aesthetic steeped in effortless regality and proudly celebrated traditions.
Waters’ work has been featured in numerous institutions and galleries including the Seattle Art Museum, Frye Art Museum, Hedreen Gallery, and Pivot Art + Culture. Waters’ work has been featured in issues of Rolling Stone France and Madame Figaro magazines. In 2016, her critically acclaimed solo exhibition, 100% Kanekalon: The Untold Story of the Marginalized Matriarch, exhibited at the Northwest African American Museum. In 2020 Waters’ much anticipated exhibition, Yellow No.5 debuted at the Bellevue Arts Museum.
As the founding owner of Martyr Sauce, located in the historic arts district of Pioneer Square, Waters is dedicated to cultivating artistic space and community. Waters has served in various arts organizations and institutions as well as co-founding Re:Definition gallery at the Paramount Theater in 2015, an on-going partnership with the Seattle Theatre Group redefining historic cultural space. In addition to Waters’ being a featured keynote speaker, Martyr Sauce became a Cultural Partner of the Seattle Art Fair the summer 2017.
Waters received the 2016 Conductive-Garboil-Grant and in 2018, she received the Artist-Trust- Fellowship Award. Two consecutive years in a row, Waters received the Seattle Art Museum’s 2020 Kayla Skinner Special Recognition Award and the 2021 Gary Glant Special Recognition Award. In 2020 Tariqa was the recipient of The Neddy at Cornish Open Medium Award.
Artist Statement:
My whimsical, larger-than-life, pop-inspired work references childhood memories where vanity and self-preservation collide to mask generational pain. As I think about the ubiquitous and often redundant conversations around femininity, beauty, race, sexuality, and inclusion, my overarching motivation is to create innovative ways to distort reality to the point where marginalization is impossible. If the viewer questions the ability to challenge those possibilities using seemingly low-cost items and esthetics, they are then confronted with their daily temperamental resistance to the subject’s value and worth. Humor, satire and spectacle are prevalent in most of my works, but I always aspire for the art to resonate as very personal and sincere.
For my self-portraitures, I use the women and men from my upbringing as muses and I like to keep the line between feminine and masculine opaque if not entirely invisible. The large-scale objects that feature heavily in my paintings, photography, videography, and installation work are actual sculptures and fabrications that I construct and is scaled up 10x its original size transactional relationship between culture and consumerism and how they work in tandem to oftentimes serve as standalone pieces. Each object that I construct or larger is intended to reveal the conceal their connection.
