Mariam Aziza Stephan

Through her personal experience as a first generation Afghan-German American, topics of war take centrality in Mariam Stephan's art. Her work is characterized by formless landscapes that reflect the detrimental aftermaths of war. Using ink and oil, Mariam employs rhythmic blemishes, marks, and streaks to visually represent the sounds of grief. Heavily inspired by Goya’s Disasters of War etchings, she treats her landscapes as portraits, carriers of scars ensuing from political, psychological, and environmental upheaval. These abstract terrains personify human bodies conjoining with unrecognizable geography, combining man and earth. Mariam creates this parallel to memorialize our environments and remind us of our shared losses.

Mariam is fascinated with the physical effects of war and its manifestations in the human mind, positing that the psychological effects are more unsettling than the war itself. Considering this, it is essential for her to individualize landscapes as portraits wearing scars of their distinct histories. Mariam received the North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship in 2018, and was a 2010-11 Fulbright Scholar to Egypt. She currently is a painting professor at UNC Greensboro.