Armaan Mumtaz interprets spiritual duality through drawing and installation in his Honors Studio

May 12, 2023

Each year, nine seniors in the Department of Art Practice are selected to receive an honors studio for their final semester. Each student receives their own studio space with 24/7 access. The studio space allows students to work on longer-term projects and explore new mediums alongside their cohort. Arts & Humanities had the opportunity to interview three of the nine students in this year's honors studios as they completed their final projects for Professor Stephanie Syjuco's Art + Archive class.

Armaan Mumtaz is an honors studio recipient, the recipient of the department citation award, and the 2023 Art Practice student commencement speaker. All photos by Jen Siska.

Armaan Mumtaz
Art Practice 23', Honors Studio Visit

Q: What brought you to Berkeley and the Department of Art Practice?

Armaan: I went to an arts-focused High School — the San Diego School of Creative Performing Arts. It was an interesting way to learn how to do things, from talking through critique, or even thinking about your work on a technical and conceptual level. That said, it was largely in preparation for a conservatory, or the track was very much leading you towards applying to an arts-based University, which is what I assumed I was going to do for a while. But upon touring Berkeley, I really loved the school. I made my decision after visiting for Cal Day when I was still in high school. Coincidentally, I got to catch the pop-up honors open studio. So it is a really full circle moment to be an honors studio student this semester.

I think I've always been like a hobbyist — drawing was my pastime and favorite activity my whole life. it was convenient in that it was a fun thing for me to do, but also lent itself to having a skill. Since I went to an arts high school, I was able to use those credits to declare in my freshman year, which was really convenient because it made the competition to get into the classes I wanted way less intense. I was able to start taking studio classes from my first semester on. The first class I walked into at Berkeley was a printmaking class.

From that first class, the art department has defined my entire experience here. It's been a wonderful experience and I've been able to enjoy exactly the perks that I expected — attention from faculty, distribution of resources, and, you know, an alternative to the very cutthroat competitive nature I felt I might encounter at a private institution. I found a beautiful sense of community, especially in my last semester here with the honors cohort, and I've been met with peers who are only ever supportive, and faculty who are only looking out for the best. And that's just been really touching and empowering throughout my practice in college.

Q: How did your parents respond when you told them you would be majoring in Art Practice? Did you ever consider another major?

Armaan: Luckily, they [my parents] were supportive because they had never seen me do anything else. They felt it would have been a major disservice to not allow me to institutionally pursue this thing that they had seen me naturally be passionate about. Of course, they were excited that I chose Berkeley because it presented the opportunity to study anything.

For a while, I felt compelled to give art practice and media studies equal academic attention. So I did three years of coursework in Media Studies. Ultimately, art practice ended up really shining through as what I now consider to be my primary focus. I enjoyed my media studies coursework so much — I really enjoyed the art history, ethnic studies, and other humanities classes I took outside of the department, they were some of the most enriching experiences I had here.

I remember having this realization early on in freshman year when I was leaving class to go back to my dorm and I was like “Oh my god, I'm receiving such a rich education right now.” It felt so exciting to know that I was at this institution where I was just being taught all these things and had access to all of this knowledge. I often recontextualize that moment when I think about me and my sister being some of the first people in our family to have the privilege of going to a four-year university. I often think about familial legacy and the ways in which this is what my family hoped for when they moved to the States. My father is from Pakistan and my mother is from Mexico. It’s emotional to think about that legacy.

Q: How has the honors studio transformed your practice?

Armaan: I look back fondly on my work over the past three years, but I was definitely working within smaller parameters. I've always been focused on surface alteration, mark-making, and drawing. Painting and drawing were pretty much all I would do. Working with Professor Brody Reiman has been transformative and helped me to expand my scale. Once I did that, I knew I needed to apply for the honors studio. I thought, if I have my own space, I can actually continue to not only expand scale but also think about exploring installation and new mediums.

Having an honors studio has also provided a sense of a beautiful community that is supportive and connected to one another. And generally just being able to make a space my own the way one might make a bedroom or a presentation of themselves.

In my work, I oftentimes have represented and drawn fabric but had never used fabric itself. Having this space has allowed me to explore installations on the wall and floor — converging my 2D practice and exploring 3D works. The rug you see on the desk [in the picture] is modeled after a Muslim prayer rug. The rug was included in an installation and was presented on the floor in front of a curtain figure. I drew the motifs you see on the fabric using colored pencils— referencing images of eyes and veins. These representations are allowing me to reinterpret religious artifacts through my own visual language as a way to visually remediate my relationship to faith and my personal practice of faith.

I also had a beautiful experience working in this studio and taking Stephanie Syjuco’s Arts and Archive class. With Stephanie’s, in all her wisdom and guidance, she encouraged me to explore photography because of my interest in self-portraits. A transformative moment was when she suggested that I do a literal portrait on myself — like make the markings on my body and then make myself the subject in a photo — I said “I can’t do that!” But then, I did. And it was such an expansive moment in my practice.

Q: What artworks are we seeing represented in the photos of your studio and works?

Armaan: You’re seeing an exploration of my own religious faith and the convergence of two contradictory worlds through an alternative prayer space. Alternative Shrine: Making a Home and the Spiritually Perverse is the name of the installation in the honors show and was an exploration of imagining what my prayer space, or an alternative shrine, might look like.

I identify largely as Muslim. And the interesting thing is that is pretty much what all my work is about, even though I was raised with both Catholicism and Islam. My mother is Catholic, my dad is Muslim. So it's been really exciting, and at times challenging, to explore the ways in which those two faiths and approaches to culture and belief, which are often considered contradictory, might coexist within me and my identity.

Offering up the possibility for simultaneous expressions of faith is really interesting to me because it's always seemed like my only option to hold both things at once, and I don't really want to let one or the other go. Both when it comes to those two religions as they pertain to one another, and when it comes to how religion pertains to me, I think a lot of my work became about faith and religion and what I consider to be this alternative, dual religion that I feel that I exist within. I think it also helped that my mother's side is comfortable with a specific sort of folk Catholicism found in Mexican culture, and that's been able to allow me to be much more interpretive with faith. These things are taboo or contradictory, and yet they are home, they are my familiarity, they're the dual religion I hold.

I'm exploring the potential for performance or video to drive home this idea of how this would perform as a prayer space.

Q: What are your post-graduation plans? Will you pursue an artistic practice?

Armaan: I'm definitely at the crossroads of graduation where I'm keeping in mind this track of pursuing a residency, applying for grants and fellowships, and looking for studio space. To really pursue this working artist thing. I mean, how fulfilling that would be! I'm also trying to keep an open mind for myself, and am considering whether to pursue the whole Berkeley LinkedIn internship route. I’ve had a lot of experience in editorial illustration and journalistic and marketing internships throughout my time here, so I have to decide whether I'm corporate rising, or whether I'm pursuing myself.

Ideally, I hope to be able to do both, like I’ve done while at Berkeley. Doing my personal practice where I'm making things I want to make that I feel best represent myself. But also utilizing the technicality and fine skills I’ve developed to garner a career. And in that way, the work I do for editorial illustration is so different from the way in which I work for my practice. I guess it is technically a part of my practice, but I consider it a very different sector at the very least.

I'm excited by the prospect of pursuing my practice and I think this experience with not only the growth of my work in this past year but also with my cohort has been so beautiful and so eye-opening that it's allowed me to see what this practice can be in the future and how fulfilling working as an artist and working with other artists could prove to be.

Q: You’ve been awarded the department citation award and will be speaking at graduation, how are you feeling?

Armaan: I'm excited for graduation, I'm really honored to have been given the department citation award. I’m so lucky to be speaking at the commencement, which is just such a huge honor. I think it's just going to be like a wonderful time to wrap everything up and address everyone I love and care about in that room. And to be able to thank the department for really treating me better than I could have ever expected.