Yasmine Nasser Diaz’s multidisciplinary practice navigates overlapping tensions around religion, gender, and third-culture identity. Born and raised in Chicago to parents who immigrated from the highlands of southern Yemen, her work often reflects personal histories and the contrasting values of the cultures she was raised within. Her fiber etchings, immersive installations and mixed media collage on paper draw from personal archives as well as found imagery and reflect on coming-of-age nostalgia, Yemeni American girlhood and the notion of soft power. Reframing the concept of soft power within her work, Diaz considers the covert skills that she and her sisters developed to adapt to their environments as children of immigrants being raised within tight-knit communities which often perpetuates the crystallization of a culture.
(Excerpt and image above selected from grant proposal and the artist’s website. Artwork is copyright of the artist.)