Mansur Nurullah: Waves of Change and History Re-asserts Itself

In his first solo exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco-based Mansur Nurullah presents intricately stitched, wall-hanging sculptures that build on the legacies of African-American quilt makers to trace personal and community histories.  Made from discarded clothing, upholstery, bits of fur, disassembled shoes and handbags and other detritus, he incorporates the pasts of those materials and the people who used them, to depict personal or social narratives in exuberant, three-dimensional artworks that exist beyond the boundaries of painting, sculpture or textile.

Living and working in San Francisco, Nurullah moves through the city on foot or bicycle and thinks of plotting one’s course in daily life as a metaphor for finding one’s place in the world.  He sees each of his artworks as charting a journey - whether tracing the lives of students he councils, the social travails of marginalized communities or the flight of his great grandparents from Tulsa to a new life in Chicago.  These billowing, three-dimensional quilts are the topographic maps of people’s emotional lives.

Nurullah recognizes that we live in a rapidly changing, tumultuous world, in which we are constantly bombarded with news of personal, local and international traumas.  In his artworks, he offers up the possibility of finding a way through the chaos of the present and the harms of the past. We may feel alone or adrift in the world, Nurrullah posits, but as we trek through the landscapes we share, we can discover solutions together.

In addition to his art practice, Mansur Nurullah works with suspended and expelled youth as a counselor in the San Francisco Unified School District. He has been awarded residencies with Recology (San Francisco) and, through the San Francisco Arts Commission, the San Francisco Planning Department.  Nurullah is an affiliate artist at Minnesota Street Projects.