Abdi Farah’s artwork explores the parallels between the expansive subculture of high school football in New Orleans and its connection to the larger capitalistic co-opting of Black men through sports in America. Much of Farah’s work incorporates the sewing of used clothes and fabrics, often in colors and sheens reductively described as feminine. Through the embrace of this “woman’s work” he unpacks stereotypical notions of masculinity.

Farah received a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009 and an MFA from Tulane University in 2018. He has exhibited his work across the country and internationally at institutions including the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, Miami, FL; Institute for American Universities, Aix-en-Provence, France; Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans, LA; among others, and has had a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, NY. Farah is a 2005 Presidential Scholar in the Arts; a recipient of the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship through the Yale Norfolk School of Music and Art; a 2017 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture participant; and a 2021 Black Rock Senegal and Joan Mitchell Center artist in residence.