Alyssa Sakina Pheobus attended Yale University as a first-generation college student and completed her MFA at Columbia University, where she was a fellow of the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies. Alyssa’s creative projects and research have been supported by grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Center for Craft, the Mass Cultural Council, Dieu Donné and NYFA. She has recently been an artist-in-residence at Zea Mays Printmaking and is preparing for forthcoming residencies at Yaddo and the Center for Contemporary Printmaking. She joined the art faculty of Williams College in 2022.

Unfolding at the intersections of abstraction and contemplative practice, my work engages with the transcultural sacred science of geometry and its diverse manifestations in global architecture, textiles and arts of the book. My projects are influenced by the philosophy of Sufism and devotional traditions that articulate spiritual experience through creative acts. Moving discursively between printmaking, drawing, painting and textiles, I align the repetition of key images with meditation. Within this framework, I transform a focal image through experimenting with color, layering, collage, stenciling or printing on unusual surfaces, and constellate the various resulting forms to activate the resonances between them.