Thursday, January 16
6:00 – 9:00 pm
Indianapolis Liberation Center
Nasreen Khan has an immediate impact on your life. One day she may show up to your house with a bouquet of flowers hand-picked from her garden, and on another day, Khan may invite you to a rave party deep in the woods on a hot summer day. Any successful artist lives a full life as Khan does. Khan is an independent artist, a professor, a mother, and entrepreneur. Khan moved to Indianapolis in 2018. Her work speaks of her time growing up in West Africa and touches on important themes of womanhood and motherhood. Khan’s unique primary art medium is burning her pieces into wood and then overlaying her design with paint and adding a varnish to preserve the work. The varnish transforms the fallen tree to have an extended life and new future. A part of Khan’s work is in collecting the wood. She often goes on hikes and finds fallen trees or limbs that she collects. In a way, Nasreen is using the natural world as her canvas to convey the human experience.
Khan’s art emerged out of the necessity to survive. As an immigrant mother, she has found the means to be vulnerable with us about her life experience, and also quickly gained the attention of the local art scene while surviving. Khan has worked with many organizations such as Big Car, Newfields, Indianapolis Public Library, to name a few.
Khan’s pieces also tell stories of immigration and the ongoing system of colonialism. As our Attorney General Todd Rokita questions the legality of workers in Logansport, Indiana, Khan busies herself with securing a tiny house to provide housing for a friend who had recently lost her job and became homeless. Khan uses the little that she has to provide for those who fall into her orbit. Her work challenges us to question the popular propaganda about immigrants and inspires us to get to know our immigrant neighbors. See some of Khan’s recent work on a collaborative project with Bryn Jackson entitled “Boodle Fight,” an exploration of their shared Filipino heritage.
The Fonseca-Du Bois Gallery is rebranding our art openings starting this 2025 season. We will have our Third Thursday art openings every month! We aim to find new ways to engage art audiences in a gallery that puts social justice as a focal point. This year, we plan to engage the public more in our art programming that will feature artists and create new ones by providing space for the public to create collective art works to go on display in the gallery. When we say that we want to unleash the creativity of the masses, we mean it!
Featured photo: Nasreen Khan while burning her design into a piece of wood.