Asma Chaudhary

Asma Chaudhary is a Pakistani-American artist, sculptor, and educator from Fairfax, Virginia. Her artworks explore the duality of a domesticated homemaker by physically recreating the home environment. Asma makes every effort to use discarded materials and repurpose them into basic necessities for survival such as shelter, warmth, luminance, sustenance, mobility, and intellectual growth. Some of her installations include breaking down grocery carts and welding them into chairs, sewing workman’s gloves together to create couture-like dresses and cushions, and reformatting sleep bags to play on the idea of innocence and crisis. Asma pays homage to handicrafts made by village artisans in India and Pakistan through her use of vibrant colors and intricate techniques. Her sculptures, furniture pieces, artist-made books, photography, and performance-based work have been show in several juried group and solo exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout New York, Michigan, Illinois, Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland, Connecticut, and the Washington, D.C. area.

Asma’s art practice intertwines her passion for philanthropy where she often donates proceeds from her artwork sales to benefit charities such as the Malala Fund, STEM For Her, Helping Hand, and the American Red Cross as a means for improving women’s and girls’ education, eradicating poverty, and assisting with disaster relief. In 2016, the March of Dimes honored Asma with a Heroines of Washington Award for her humanitarian work. Since then, Asma has served on their annual selections committee to recognize other community service champions.

As part of her aesthetic research efforts to study South Asian culture, Asma has taken trips to Sialkot and Lahore in Pakistan as well as to Abu Dhabi, Deira, Dubai, and Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. She is a member of the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective, Washington Project for the Arts, Greater Reston Arts Center (GRACE), CulturalDC, Washington Sculptors Group, Artomatic, Pyramid Atlantic Arts Center, McLean Project for the Arts, and the National Museum for Women in the Arts. Her work has been published in American Art Collector and four consecutive times in Studio Visit Magazine (Volumes 25, 27, 30, and 31).

In 2017, Asma was featured on the live television program, CBS 9’s Great Day Washington, as well as Delegate Ken Plum’s television program, Channel 28’sVirginia Report, to promote her six years of participating with Maker Faire NoVa and MAKE Magazine’s Maker Faire communities and serving as their Social Media Consultant. She has also received Director’s Choice Best of Show award ribbons for several private gallery exhibitions. From 2015-2016, her artwork was on display for one year in the Muskegon Museum of Art in Michigan, Michigan and then traveled to the Dennos Museum Center in Traverse City, Michigan. In 2015, three of Asma’s artworks were selected by the curatorial assistant for the Whitney Museum of American art for an exhibition in Huntington, New York. Asma is the recipient of the 2014 Best of Show Award from the Hylton Center and Buchanan Partners Art Gallery and completed a solo exhibition with them from June through August 2015.

As an Adjunct Professor of New Media at Mason and Career Influencers Network Member, Asma’s Mason Core curriculum is often recognized by students for helping them prepare as well-rounded citizens and engaged scholars who are prepared for the professional workforce. Asma holds a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Critical Art Practices and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Graphic Information Design and Electronic Journalism, both from George Mason University.

Degrees

• MFA, Critical Art Practices, George Mason University
• BFA, Graphic Information Design and Electronic Journalism, George Mason University

Specialist Area:

New Media in the Creative Arts