Dobbs Ferry Artist Awarded Grant to Create Mural
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By Rick Pezzullo—
A Dobbs Ferry artist has been awarded a grant to create an artwork that transforms ArtsWestchester’s gallery vault in White Plains into an immersive world of clay, color and intricate pattern.
Rana Amirtahmasebi was given $3,500 from the Janet Langsam Vault Project and ArtsWestchester, which was established to recognize Langsam, ArtsWestchester’s former CEO of 33 years, and continue a tradition of awarding grants to eligible artists for their innovative proposals to create memorable art installations in the organization’s historic Mosler vault.
Amirtahmasebi is an artist, architect and urban planner whose multidisciplinary practice converges ceramics, printmaking and cartography. Her work occupies the space between image and object, and between ornament and function.
Drawing on pattern, repetition and spatial composition, she creates pieces that are both tactile and narrative. Rooted in her Iranian background and shaped by her training in architecture and urbanism, her practice reflects an ongoing inquiry into memory, place and the human experience of space.
Based in New York, Amirtahmasebi has worked internationally in urban planning, cultural strategy and public space. She holds graduate degrees from MIT in architecture and city planning. As an immigrant, she is especially drawn to the capacity of art and objects to carry cultural experience, preserving memory, identity and belonging across geographies.
Amirtahmasebi’s artwork, entitled Continuum: Terra, is a site-specific installation created for ArtsWestchester’s vault that explores pattern and repetition as central carriers of meaning rather than decoration. The artwork draws on architectural context in which the patterns also function as a spatial and philosophical device—guiding the eye, structuring movement and suggesting infinity through repetition. Using clay and color, the installation constructs an immersive environment within the vault.
Created in a time of severe political tension, conflict, and social overload, the vault installation becomes a refuge: a dreamlike interior of visual immersion that invites a moment of pause. The installation’s pattern known as “the hat,” which displays prominently in the work, is a mathematical form that can extend infinitely without repeating in the same way. Its endless variation recalls the dense ornamental environments of Middle Eastern palaces, bazaars and religious spaces, evoking the visual abundance that shaped the artist’s childhood in Iran.
At the same time, the work is tied to a more fragile impulse: a fear of losing such spaces to war, bombs and missiles — and with them, the textures of memory they hold. In this sense, the project attempts to build a permanent visual memory from childhood, translating pattern into both refuge and remembrance.
Continuum: Terra will be on display at ArtsWestchester as part of the Janet Langsam Vault Project from Sat., May 16 – Sun., Aug. 2. A public opening reception is being held on May 16 from 5 to 7 p.m.
ArtsWestchester’s Gallery is located at 31 Mamaroneck Ave. in White Plains. Gallery hours are: Wed., – Fri and Sun. noon to 5 p.m. and Sat, noon to 6 p.m. More info: https://artswestchester.org/gallery/.
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