Bio

Malikah Tamirah (b. 2002; Savannah, Georgia) is a visual artist exploring everyday life in the American South through memory, relationships, and human psychology. Through her Black Southern experience, Tamirah draws from family, community, and familiar surroundings to examine how personal experiences shape our perceptions of ourselves and others. Her work considers the relationship between memory, imagination, desire, and human connection.

Tamirah was included in the 2023 AXA Art Prize as one of the finalists invited to exhibit work at the New York Art Academy in New York City. In 2024, Tamirah’s work, “Round the Neighborhood” was exhibited in Venice, Italy for inclusion in the global art prize Arte Laguna at the Arsenale. Arte Laguna runs concurrently with the Biennale and includes 160 artworks from around the world. Tamirah’s work has been exhibited in Savannah and New York, and written about in the Savannah Connect. She graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design with a BFA in Painting, 2024 and was awarded the Dean’s Award for Artistry and Citizenship in the Painting Department.

Artist Statement

My artistic practice explores the relationship between personal experience and universal human psychology. Through the lens of my Black Southern experience, I draw from memory, relationships, community, and everyday encounters to examine how we perceive ourselves, one another, and the worlds we imagine for ourselves. My work is grounded in the belief that intimate experiences can reveal something larger about the ways we connect, desire, remember, and understand our reality.

Family, friends, community, and personal memories remain at the center of my practice. I am interested in the dynamics that exist between people and the ways we influence and project onto one another. Through my work, I explore the internal lives beneath these interactions, considering the relationship between thought, emotion, desire, and behavior.

Memory and imagination often overlap within my work. I revisit familiar people, places, objects, and cultural references while allowing them to shift beyond their original context. Southern novelties, inherited traditions, and personal experiences become vehicles for exploring ideas that extend beyond a specific time or place.

Through this process, my work exists between the personal and the universal, the tangible and the psychological. I use the familiarity of my own experiences to invite viewers into their own memories, relationships, desires, and internal worlds. Ultimately, my work explores how we construct meaning from what we have lived, what we feel, and what we believe is possible.