Collection: Casting the Net: Zahra Almajidi

Casting the Net flows between constructed memory and contradictory materiality, exploring how people living in the diaspora can build upon ancestral craft and design traditions to forge connections with a displaced culture.

Working across fine art and design, Almajidi employs analog and digital fabrication methods to create design objects, jewelry, and digital prints that challenge conditions of loss and reassert presence through material and form. Through a colorful, figurative, and ornamental visual language, she transforms the gallery into a site of confrontation and speculative world-building.

Drawing from the imagery of Marsh Arab rugs and other cultural objects, the exhibition looks beyond a past that has been systematically erased and projects a future that both preserves and expands upon an endangered craft and material culture.

Zahra Almajidi is a visual artist raised and based in Detroit, MI. Her work explores the ways in which objects and adornment allow displaced people to continue to uphold and practice their craft traditions while living in the diaspora.

She is a 2025 Emerging Artist Fellowship recipient, powered by Gilbert Family Foundation.