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Tahirah Rasheed earned her BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently an MFA candidate in Sculpture / Dimensional Studies at Alfred University. Her work has been shown at Jonathan Carver Moore Gallery, Pioneer Axis Square, The Factory, and Steve Gilbert Studio, and she was Yerba Buena Center for the Arts honoree, a triennial showcase of visionary Bay Area artists. She was an emerging artist-in-residence at Pilchuck Glass School in 2024, expanding her neon and glass practice. Rasheed's projects have been featured in The New York Times, ARTnews, TIME, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, W Magazine and more. Working across glass, neon sculpture, and installation, her practice is grounded in material transformation, where heat, tension, and risk are conditions of making. Glass functions as both substance and symbol-capable of rupture yet resilient through process-—mirroring contradictions that shape her lived experience and that of many Black women in the United States. This understanding of material endurance is informed in part by her 2025 diagnosis and survival of a rare cancer. She works across visual art, community organizing, and education.

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About the Exhibition

Light That Refuses Silence is an exhibition about the politics of survival, care, & illumination within Black womanhood. Rooted in lived experience of medical & institutional harm, the work transforms glass, print & photography into a visual language of breath & boundary. These pieces reject the demand that Black women endure quietly. They position care as self-defense, rest as revolt, and light as a scar that glows instead of fading. In conversation with Audre Lorde and bell hooks, the work asserts that to name pain is resistance, & to imagine healing is a political act. Tenderness is not fragility, it is strategy. The exhibition invites audiences to witness not triumph, but truth: survival is not linear, healing is not silent, & Black women have always been architects of our own light.

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Tickets to visit MoAD and view the exhibitions:

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