Tariku Shiferaw

Tariku Shiferaw (born 1983, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) is an Ethiopian-American artist whose painting-based practice explores abstraction, mark-making, language, Blackness, and the social and political structures embedded in visual culture. Working across painting, works on paper, installation, and text-based abstraction, Shiferaw examines how formal gestures can hold questions of race, migration, power, and belonging through repetition, seriality, and a restrained but conceptually charged visual vocabulary.  Shiferaw earned his BFA from the University of Southern California in 2007 and his MFA from Parsons The New School for Design in 2015. His work often engages abstraction, language, conceptual art, popular culture, and institutional critique, using monochrome surfaces, repeated marks, titles drawn from music and vernacular speech, and tightly controlled painterly systems to consider the metaphysical possibilities of painting alongside the political and social frameworks that shape it. He has also participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, The Drawing Center’s Open Sessions, and several residencies in New York and abroad.  His work has been exhibited at Smack Mellon, ICA Miami, Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling, and galleries including Galerie Lelong, Addis Fine Art, and Vielmetter Los Angeles. He lives and works in New York City.