Artist to Watch: Uman’s Intuitive Paintings Shimmer with Color and Meaning
The rising talent's first solo museum show will open October 19 at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut
The artist Uman resides and works in upstate New York now, but she moved across three countries to get there. Born in Somalia and raised in Kenya before leaving home at 13 to live in Denmark, then migrating to New York City, she creates ravishing, expansive canvases that reflect this Odyssean journey as well as her personal response to nature. “Everything for me has been self-taught and adaptation,” she says.
Uman found early influences in French Impressionists and American Abstract Expressionists and over time discovered contemporary mentors. This year, she drew inspiration from Jack Whitten’s retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, seeing in his work “the possibility of being able to just make everything without any definition,” she says. “Is it figurative? Is it abstract? Is it a self-portrait? I feel like I blur the lines.”
Since relocating upstate in 2010, she has developed a disciplined studio practice. “I was in self-discovery,” says the artist, who had her breakout exhibition in 2015 at White Columns in New York. “After that show and my move, I started to realize how I would like to present myself.” In 2023, she announced her co-representation with Hauser & Wirth and Nicola Vassell, where a solo show will open on October 30. She also has a survey exhibition planned at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in New York next year.
At her studio, Uman likes to make a drawing a day, what she calls an “amuse-bouche.” She then works on multiple paintings in tandem, applying paint directly to the canvas intuitively, with a 30-minute timer set to remind herself to move on to another.
Up next, her first solo museum show will open October 19 at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Organized by the museum’s chief curator, Amy Smith-Stewart, the exhibition showcases the artist’s paintings and a monumental glowing sculpture of an urban streetlight as well as a video stitching together nocturnal footage of snowfall outside her home in the country.
“The paintings shimmer with color, weaving together spirals and grids, orbs and all-seeing eyes, anatomical organs and native botany, informed by memories of East Africa, the hyperkinetic tapestry of New York City, and the vast upstate countryside,” Smith-Stewart says.
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2025 Late Fall Issue in the section “Artists to Watch.” Subscribe to the magazine.