NEW YORK, NY.- Few artists make color feel quite as physical as Uman. Across paintings that teem with circles, grids, eyes, plants, bodies, animals and mysterious signs, color is not merely decorative or expressive; it becomes a repository for experience. “Color is memory,” the artist has said, a phrase that supplies both the title and central idea of Lauren Cornell’s opening essay in Uman, an ambitious new monograph published by Monacelli in association with the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College.

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Uman

A richly illustrated volume on the contemporary artist’s visionary practice

Explore Uman’s vibrant visual world through painting, color, abstraction, symbolism, and a deeply personal language of contemporary art.

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The book accompanies Uman: In Between, the artist’s first institutional survey, organized by Cornell at the Hessel Museum of Art and on view from June 27 through November 29, 2026. Yet the publication is more than an exhibition catalogue. According to CCS Bard executive director Tom Eccles, it is the first volume to fully illustrate and analyze Uman’s practice, reproducing nearly twice as many works as appear in the exhibition. The result is a substantial portrait of an artist whose career has developed outside many of the conventional routes into the contemporary art establishment.





Born in Mogadishu in 1980 and raised partly in Kenya, Uman later lived in Europe before arriving in New York around the beginning of the new millennium. Her biography inevitably enters discussions of the work, but one of the strengths of this book is its resistance to letting biography become an explanation for everything. Cornell is particularly sharp on the limitations of the “outsider artist” label that followed Uman early in her career. Rather than treating the absence of formal art-school training as a deficiency, the essay asks what training actually means—and what is lost when an artist is understood primarily through categories of origin, gender or institutional access.

What emerges instead is an artist with an enormous appetite for images.

Uman’s vocabulary pulls from memories of East Africa, Islamic patterning and textiles, landscapes, animals, European museum culture, American abstraction and the visual debris of everyday life. Early in New York, she scavenged materials around the garment district and Chelsea, transforming discarded chairs, purses, clothing and wood into artworks. Later, after moving upstate, the paintings expanded dramatically in scale and complexity.

These different periods do not feel disconnected. Throughout the book, dots become eyes, eyes become cells, grids turn into webs and landscapes dissolve into bodies. A painting can hover somewhere between microscopic biology and astronomy, abstraction and portraiture, recollection and hallucination.

That ambiguity is central to Omar Jason Farah’s essay, “Tall Tales from the Afro-Queer Interstices.” Looking at works including Wild, Wild Bitch in the Country and Malaria Tripping, Farah argues that Uman’s strange spaces should not simply be read as dreamscapes. The artist has described such works as self-portraits, and Farah approaches them as “architectures of self”: places where identity can exist outside familiar systems of classification.

Amber Jamilla Musser moves the discussion toward sensation. Her essay “Invitations into Feeling” begins with Midnight in the Park and Looking for Trade (2023), a nocturnal painting alive with branches, eyes, suggestive bodily forms and a luminous moon. Musser’s reading of the work is especially useful because it resists translating every symbol into a fixed meaning. Instead, she emphasizes the painting’s erotic charge in the broadest sense—the sensation of bodies becoming porous to landscape, atmosphere and other forms of life.





The book ultimately makes its most forceful critical case in Roberta Smith’s concluding essay, “The Irresistible Sublime.” Smith describes Uman as one of the most remarkable painters to emerge since the beginning of the twenty-first century, arguing for the unapologetic power of beauty in work that refuses traditional divisions between East and West, abstraction and representation, painting and drawing, art and craft. She draws connections with artists as diverse as Cy Twombly, Paul Klee, Joan Miró and Jackson Pollock without reducing Uman’s paintings to a catalogue of influences.

That distinction matters. The pleasures of Uman’s work come precisely from the sense that influences have been absorbed so completely that they have ceased to behave like quotations. Everything enters the same visual ecosystem.

Designed by Na Kim and edited by Simon Hunegs, the volume wisely allows those paintings to dominate. Full-page reproductions and details repeatedly interrupt the essays, while close-ups reveal the density of marks that can disappear when Uman’s large canvases are reduced to screen size. Even the endpapers were designed by the artist. Published by Monacelli, a Phaidon company, the book also includes extensive lists of works in the catalogue and exhibition.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Uman is how little the work resembles the tidy story of artistic progression that monographs often impose. Motifs vanish and return. Abstraction becomes figuration and then slips back again. Paintings are revised, layered and allowed to mutate.

That restlessness is the point.

Rather than presenting Uman as an artist who has finally arrived at a mature style, the book captures someone still inventing her language. Cornell describes a practice that continually branches outward; Smith sees a borderless contemporary painting; Musser finds invitations to feel differently; Farah discovers spaces in which different forms of identity can exist.

Taken together, their essays suggest that Uman’s achievement lies not in choosing between these possibilities, but in refusing the choice altogether.