Walking through the doors of East Window’s cozy digs on North Broadway in Boulder, a collision of innocence and violence greets visitors on the gallery’s west-facing wall.
The site of this confrontation is a large-scale wheatpasted photograph of a 4-year-old girl, her brown eyes shining beneath a mop of bangs as she poses for the camera with hands clasped behind her back. A strap of ammo is sketched in Sharpie over the shoulder of her plaid cottagecore dress — her shadow, rendered in the same inky black scrawl, becomes the silhouette of an armed revolutionary with a rifle raised in victory.
That little girl is Amitis Motevalli, now 55, whose family migrated from Tehran to New York City one year before the Iranian Revolution in 1978. Like the nearly dozen other family photos populating her ongoing exhibit at the NoBo Arts District gallery space through June 20, the image spins a snapshot of her childhood into a fantasy of the violent stereotypes imprinted on Muslim people in the United States.
“It confronts people with what they've got going inside themselves,” Motevalli tells Boulder Weekly on a recent video call. “I think it’s really important to have that confrontation, to sit with the underlying bigotry we might have. What do you do when you're actually confronted with your ideologies that are not serving everybody, that are probably not serving you?”
In each manipulated glimpse from her past, Motevalli’s childhood memories take on startling new life. With the stroke of a marker, she becomes a masked toddler vacantly beholding a cache of weapons spread out on the beach during a family trip to the Caspian Sea; a kid on horseback with a 40-watt smile and an assault rifle slung over her shoulder; a bare-butt baby in a balaclava, toying curiously with a pistol.
“In the spirit of revolution, I wanted to go beyond the stereotypes and put that power in the hands of a little girl. It's a bit absurd, but I wanted to put a seed in their heads: The agency can be ours,” she says. “We are seen as the threat, but why don't we become the threat to all the things that shouldn't exist in the world, of the things that are causing oppression in our lives, that are even making some of the people who are doing the oppressing miserable? Why don't we be the agents of change?”
‘The future of what?’
The origins of this fever dream family photo album (titled A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Rebel) trace back to the post-9/11 fervor of 2003, shortly after the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, when anti-Islam sentiment was at a fever pitch in the U.S. With hate crimes against Muslims spiking 500% in the fallout of the New York City terrorist attack, Motevalli says it was a scary time to interrogate her Iranian-American identity through art.
“It was frightening, because basically everyone was told to snitch on Muslims based on their activities. Those activities could be saying simple Arabic phrases, like Alhamdulillah, ‘God is great’ — basically just being ourselves,” she says. "People who were in hijab, or in what may seem like hijab, were getting confronted. Sikhs were being confronted, as were Black women wearing headscarves who may not have been Muslim. People were being detained. People were being disappeared. So it was not unlike the environment happening right now.”
Amid this surging anti-Islam reaction, Motevalli says she was shocked by a display at the Museum of Tolerance in her home base of Los Angeles. With a stated mission of “challenging visitors to understand the Holocaust in both historic and contemporary contexts,” the cultural education center’s Jerusalum outpost would later make headlines for building on an ancient Muslim burial ground. Walking into the California location with a group of students, she says she was confronted by an image that would catalyze her photography project.
“As we're entering, there was a poster of a Palestinian child with flames behind them, and it said: The future of terrorism,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘The future of what? This child has the ability to be nothing else but a terrorist?”
From that moment of indignation, Motevalli turned to her past to understand the present. Flipping through family photos, she began to toy with the idea of marrying her tender childhood memories with the racist fantasies rattling in the minds of jingoistic Americans. Hoping to reproduce the manipulated images in 8x10, 5x7 and wallet size, like “corny family portraits you would get at Sears back in the day,” the wheels began to turn on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Rebel. There was just one problem.
“Nobody would show it,” she says of the work that would eventually exhibit in international galleries in Iran and Italy. “I had studio visits with two curators who said I was making terrorist propaganda. I'm like, ‘Wow, nobody sees the comedy in this. Nobody sees the irony at all.’”
One person who got the joke, and the pain behind it, was East Window gallery owner and curator Todd Herman. Twenty years after the artist’s early struggles finding exhibition space, he got the idea to pair her childhood photo series with documentation of a performance piece called Jokes on Me / Stupid Muslim Joke, in which Motevalli invited strangers to write sincere responses to racist jokes on her body. Herman says the hybrid exhibit is a way to spark cross-cultural conversation when we need it most.
“Humor can be an access point for difficult issues,” he says. “That's why I wanted to present [Motevalli’s work], because there's a lot in here that people can feel indicted by. I don't want to water that down, but I do want to create access for dialogue, versus alienating people.”
For the kids
According to data from UNICEF, more than 15,000 children have been killed in Israel’s war on Gaza since a Hamas-led attack in October 2023, with an additional 34,000 kids injured and almost 1 million displaced. This grim milestone represents a new chapter in the ongoing military campaign that has resulted in an overall Palestinian death toll of more than 50,000 — approaching the combined populations of Lafayette and Louisville — but the plight of the embattled region’s most vulnerable residents has been on Motevalli’s heart since the earliest moments of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Rebel.
“I was thinking about what the children of Palestine are going through, and also about children in other spaces: The wars on Iraq and Afghanistan had already started. I was thinking about how children are seen as radicals because they are the future, and seeing myself,” she says. “We can even extend that out to other children here: the children of immigrants separated from their families, put in cages. I think it extends beyond the territory of the Middle East or West Asia or the Levant. It’s about the ideology of the child that is a potential threat to upholding structures of white supremacy and capitalism.”
While the stained innocence of childhood is a major source of energy for the artist’s family portrait series, the accompanying works from Joke’s on Me / Stupid Muslim Joke imprint the plight of Muslim people (quite literally) onto the artist’s adult body. For the interactive public performance, Motevalli covered herself in stickers emblazoned with online jokes about “Stupid Muslims,” inviting the public to respond in writing on her body.
“I was drained,” she says. “It really took a toll on me as a human. I couldn't even read some of the most derogatory things written on me.”
Back in his North Boulder gallery, Herman says bringing this nuanced confrontation to our relatively comfortable foothills hamlet is intentional. Whether grappling with the dehumanizing stereotypes ascribed to children or the everyday racism faced by vulnerable communities writ large, he says the goal is to dwell with discomfort in the name of advancing empathy.
“Struggles always seem to be somewhere over there. The threads around this world, I try to keep them real close to me,” Herman says. “It's important to keep these narratives alive in environments where there's a lot of comfort, affluence and potentially complacency. There's things that I never in my life thought we would forget, and here we are again.”
Motevalli finds a similar urgency in the idea of bringing people face to face with the plight of those who once, perhaps by design, seemed far away. Maybe with a little less distance between us, her work suggests, we can see each other more clearly.
“We want to have an idea of who those people are,” she says. “Well, those people are right here. They're right in front of you. I am those people.”
ON VIEW: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Rebel + Joke’s on Me / Stupid Muslim Joke by Amitis Motevalli. Through June 20, East Window, 4550 Broadway, Suite C-3B2, Boulder. Free