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Women's History Month Interview Series with Tania Qurashi: Artist, Identity, Culture
- South Jersey Cultural Alliance
- Mar 23
- 3 min read
Tania Qurashi is an emerging artist located in South Jersey and Philadelphia. She has been actively involved with the South Jersey Arts Community for a long time and formerly served as an Arts Administrator at the South Jersey Cultural Alliance. She also led the South Jersey Artist Feature series and subsequently the South Jersey Artist Studio Tour, which was supported by the New Jersey Council for Humanities as part of the Humanities Lab project in the summer of 2023, officially launching in January 2024.
Who are you? How does womanhood tie into your work, career, and identity?
I am an artist based between South Jersey and Philadelphia. My practice includes painting and drawing. I explore figures, flowers, objects, vessels, and symbols to delve into the intersections of identity, culture, and history as it relates to my background as the daughter of immigrants from Guatemala and Pakistan.
My identity as a woman artist impacts my work because I am interested in how the female gaze and perspective is something that is charged with desire, power, and longing.
A lot of women grow up with feeling a sense of limitations whether imposed by family, culture, or society so I think painting whatever I want feels both liberating and challenging. Womanhood is something I negotiate everyday, in my private and public life. It connects me to a history of feminism and a future that is impacted by gender, in all its ambiguities and possibilities. As a woman artist today, I feel a deep sense of responsiblity to continue painting and create work that feels meaningful and engaged with the world around me.
What inspires the kind of work you do?
"Most of my work is inspired by a deep need to understand the world around me and to communicate ideas of belonging."
While I explore racial melancholy and feelings of dislocation and isolation, there is an attempt of searching and reaching out to others, whether it’s through flowers that have a kind of romantic feeling or vessels that carry a familiarity of those around me, I think the purpose of my work is to communicate that sense of longing we have for something, somewhere, or someone.
When I think about experience and inspiration, I often site my family and upbringing as a source of inspiration. I started drawing at an early age and drew on copier paper at my parents’ convenience store in South Jersey. Since I grew up here to immigrant parents from different races, religions, cultures, histories, and continents, I felt a desire to balance all of these aspects of identity, while coming of age in suburban America. I listened to alternative rock bands, read Brontë novels, and spent a lot of time with my sister and my dog. These experiences, and lack thereof, are important to my development as an artist. While I continue to draw inspiration from art, novels, movies, and stories, research has become very important. I read a lot of feminist literature and cultural studies as well as research romances, myths, and epics from Indo-Persian miniature paintings.
What has pushed you to move forward in your career when confronted with adversity?
"I feel motivated by the support of my sister."
She has been a constant source of support, and since she shares the same perspectives as me, it feels as though I can make the work I make and at least one person will understand it. Sometimes when I begin to wallow, that I am not where I would like to be in my career, I remind myself that I am privileged. There are so many people in the world that deserve to live a life like mine so I feel a sense of responsibility to move forward and offer an alternative perspective.
What does winning the Individual Artist Fellowship Grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts mean to you?
I am so honored to receive the 2026 Individual Artist Fellowship and grateful to the jury for acknowledging my work.
"I felt such a sense of relief that I could live more comfortably this year and be able to fund my practice. "
Like many artists, I work multiple jobs and try to find time in between to make paintings and drawings.
This grant will allow me to take some time off from work this Summer and Fall to create artwork in the studio.
I’ve applied to this grant once before I believe, and I looked over the application to compare it to the work now and I am happy to see how I’ve grown as an artist and that it’s been recognized and acknowledged by the jury.
You can find more information about Tania Qurashi on her online portfolio and instagram.
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