Nasreen copyedits for a living, and writes poetry and paints to stay sane. She grew up in West Africa and Indonesia and moved to the wide and gritty American Midwest by way of New York City. She and her toddler son live in their bungalow on Indianapolisí Near Westside. On a Friday night she can be found cooking various organ meats or chasing down a stellar mint julep.
I grew up in Indonesia and Senegal in a religious boarding school. My father is Afghan and Russian and my mother is Filipino/Chinese with Black indigenous roots. Growing up, Whiteness and heteronormativity was the penultimate passport to privilege. As a biracial brown girl, I didn’t quite know how to define myself. As an adult, that lingering sense of otherness persisted. I became fascinated with the margins.
The whole time that I have lived in Indianapolis, I have lived in the Haughville neighborhood. That landscape asks me to challenge my own privilege daily.I am an Indianapolis-based artist. My art is grounded in my cultural experience as a young, brown, queer immigrant mother and I draw the most inspiration from the clash of the natural world and the urban landscape that I inhabit. Much of my work focuses on the margins–the margins of respectability, of race, of culture, and of sexuality. I use hyper local materials like wood scavenged from the White River or urban trees that I mill herself. I find prophetic revelation and inspiration in the continued work of the confluence of ecology and artistry.
My art is rooted in themes of womanism and Earth-based spirituality. I work primarily in wood, creating my images with pyrography (wood burning) and then overlaying them with oil paints. My goal with my own art is that no viewer comes away indifferent. I like sensation–I am a hiker, foodie, extreme night owl, hopeless romantic, gardener of bright-colored flowers and I want my art to produce true feeling in its viewers.”