‘Aunties with Deadly Stare’ is the first solo visual art presentation by the Los Angeles based political strategist, storyteller and artist Tanzila “Taz” Ahmed. The exhibition features over twenty mixed media paintings from her Aunties with Deadly Stare series, which she created over the course of the pandemic. The series was inspired by a 2016 anti-Muslim hate crime when two older women were kicked off of an airplane because of how the flight attendants were scared by their stare. These aunties had a stare so powerful it elicited a terrorist threat. In this body of work, the Aunties of the painting take back ownership of their gaze. Of course the gaze is deadly. It quietly judges your clothing, your marriage, your weight, your cholesterol and shrivels your self-esteem into dust. Everyone who interacts with an Auntie knows this. The aunties in the series are adorned and bejeweled and the style pays a modern homage to the Kalighat style of Bengali folk art. The Aunties simple white saris are in honor of the attire worn by the female revolutionaries in the Mukti Bahini. The elongated eyes are painted with liquid black waterproof eyeliner. Each painting uses paper ephemera collaged in the background – TSA inspection receipts, Indian train tickets, Urdu text of a Sufi saint, Bangla text of Muslim teachings. The white painted bindis as seen on Bengali brides signify peace and tranquility – but we all know that Aunties are only superficially peaceful. There is nothing passive about a fierce Auntie gaze.

Tanzila “Taz” Ahmed creates at the intersection of counternarratives and culture-shifting as a South Asian American Muslim 2 nd -gen woman. She’s turned out over 500,000 Asian American voters, recorded five years of the award winning #GoodMuslimBadMuslim podcast and makes #MuslimVDay cards annually. Her essays are published in the anthologies, New Moons, Pretty Bitches, Whiter, Good Girls Marry Doctors, Love Inshallah, and in numerous online publications. A protest sign she designed for the 2017 Women’s March sits in the permanent archives of the Smithsonian Museum of American History.