Aliza Nisenbaum Combines Politics and Painting

Aliza Nisenbaum (BFA 2001, MFA 2005) credits SAIC with helping her develop her singular, politically-charged painting style. A recent Vogue article describes how the School encouraged her "highly personal, intimate style of painting that blurred the line between figuration and abstraction, with bold compositions and flat planes influenced by the great Mexican muralists—Rivera, Orozco, and María Izquierdo, whose work she reveres." Nisenbaum and her urgent series of portraits of undocumented workers and their families caught the attention of the fashion publication. 

Her colorful portraits of immigrants, part of this year's Whitney Biennial were also recently featured in the article, "This immigrant painter documents the undocumented," in the New York Post. “I was always interested in ethics and how ethics comes into painting, and thinking about the politics of visibility,” she relates in the article.