Tariku Shiferaw

Tariku Shiferaw (b. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) is a New York-based artist who explores the concept of ‘mark-making’ to address the physical, social, and political spaces of art and societal constructs. Shiferaw’s practice explores the meta-physical ideas of painting and societal structures. This formal language of geometric abstraction is executed through densely layering material to create “marks,” gestures that interrogate space-making and reference the hierarchy of systems. As the artist explains, “A mark, as physical and present as cave-markings… reveals the thinker behind the gesture—an evidence of prior markings of ideas and self onto the space.”

A select list of institutions where Shiferaw has exhibited includes the Whitney Museum of American Art, Smithso-nian Institution, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, The Drawing Center (NY), Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (Germany), Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, California African American Museum, Zuckerman Museum of Art (GA), Museum of the African Diaspora (CA), and Smack Mellon (NY). Shiferaw has participated in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art and in Open Sessions at The Drawing Center. He has also been an artist-in-residence at the LES Studio Program, Silver Art Proj-ects, ARCAthens (Greece), Experimental Print Residency at Lafayette College, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and Hermitage Artist Fellowship.