PHOENIX, AZ.- On July 23, 2025, Phoenix Art Museum premiered the 2024 Arizona Artist Awards exhibitions, featuring works by 2024 Scult Family Artist Award recipient Safwat Saleem in a solo exhibition and works by 2024 Sally and Richard Lehmann Emerging Artists Awards recipients Elizabeth Z. Pineda and Omar Soto in a group exhibition.
“As part of our larger mission to serve our community and amplify the voices and perspectives of Arizona-based artists through our annual artist awards program, we are honored to present outstanding works by Safwat Saleem, Elizabeth Z. Pineda, and Omar Soto this year,” said Jeremy Mikolajczak, the Sybil Harrington Director and CEO. “These artists demonstrate their ongoing dedication to compelling and powerful storytelling as they illuminate the many complex ways that personal and collective identities are shaped by systems, beliefs, and landscapes.”
Safwat Saleem is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice ranges from graphic design and illustration to writing, film, and sound. His body of work centers on immigrant narratives and the cultural loss through assimilation, weaving together themes of preservation, the longing to belong, resistance, and the quiet joy of parenthood. Humor, especially satire, plays a key role in his work, helping him make sense of the tensions within identity and belonging. Saleem has been named a TED Fellow, a Define American Fellow, and an AAPI Creative Catalyst Fellow.
In Saleem’s first solo exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum, Safwat Saleem: The Unrequited Love Institute (T.U.L.I.) brings together works from across Saleem’s career in a single site-specific, immersive satirical installation. Informed by the historical practice of conceptual art, T.U.L.I. invites visitors to engage with objects and systems that shape immigrant belonging, such as a number kiosk, orientation video, and immigrant clock, which are seen as tools designed to ensure that “every individual is recalibrated for seamless integration” through “behavioral correction, narrative alignment, and identity optimization” methods.
Also premiering on July 23, 2025 is a group exhibition featuring new works by 2024 Sally and Richard Lehmann Emerging Artists Awards recipients Elizabeth Z. Pineda and Omar Soto. Originally from Mexico City, Elizabeth Z. Pineda is an emerging artist whose practice uses historical and nontraditional photographic, printmaking, papermaking, and book-art processes and explores issues surrounding immigration, identity, displacement, and migrant deaths that occur in the Arizona desert. Her featured works in the 2024 Arizona Artist Awards Exhibition center on the migrant experience and draw from the Arizona landscape in various ways, exploring issues of home and belonging, identity, displacement, erasure, and the tragedy of human loss in the terrain.
Omar Soto (they/them) is a DACAmented photographer whose surreal imagery explores queer joy and escapism to navigate the marginalization they endure while living at the intersection of race, gender, and social class. For their featured series, Mediums of Hope, Soto worked with a team of costume designers, makeup and nail artists, hair and clothing stylists, jewelry artists, painters, fabricators, and models to create intricate, staged photographic scenes that mimic or draw inspiration from well known art historical works, such as Sandro Botticelli’s (1445-1510) The Birth of Venus. Their images draw from iconography related to QTBIPOC (Queer and Trans Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities, as well as music, film, art, and religious expression commonly associated with Mexican and Latinx culture. These works create dialogue between the classical and the contemporary and challenge the art historical canon by centering queer people, trans people, and people of color.
