Visual Artist
ADAM CHAMY
...that time we tried to catch the moon to make the night last forever...
... journey with me..
TWILIGHT
What does it mean to find moments of beauty for someone who struggles with sleep? Artist and writer Adam Chamy explores sleep and time in “Twilight and Other Stories”.
As an insomniac for a decade, his works provides a window into his investigation of sleep with dreamlike mixed media works, written diary entries, and a site specific installation. His characteristic vibrant colors and expressive, contrasting tones take cues from observing the changing quality of light and color as day moves to night and waking moves to sleeping. His work uses found, often gossamer materials as well as flash fiction diaries to help decipher the often illusory moments between sleeping and awakening The resulting fantastical works invite viewers to join the artist in otherworldly dream-pop states of ecstasy or abandon.
and other stories...
The Empty Portraits
The Empty Portraits series engages the kuffiyeh as both a visual anchor and a vessel of memory. A symbol long associated with Palestinian identity and resistance, the kuffiyeh has, in the wake of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, become charged with both pride and controversy. While it stands as an emblem of solidarity, it is also used at times to flatten Palestinian identity.
These portraits celebrate the kuffiyeh’s enduring presence while honoring those rendered anonymous by war. Rather than depict literal faces, the works use embroidered patterns and textile language to suggest presence, dignity, and absence simultaneously.
Prints of select smaller works are currently available here. The series remains ongoing through private commission.
Reclaming is an evolving body of work exploring speculative memory, cultural inheritance, and mythmaking in contemporary life. Rather than retelling existing myths, these pieces imagine new ones—stories where personal narrative and ancestral echoes intertwine with the symbolic language of animals, memes, and icons.
Drawing from the long human tradition of encoding meaning into animal figures—from heraldry and totems to religious allegory—these works ask: what are the fables of our time? In this space, the lines between fable and identity dissolve. Each work becomes a site of reinvention—blurring the sacred and the mundane, the past and the speculative—to reclaim space for contradiction, humor, and radical possibility.
ADAM CHAMY
STATEMENT: Adam Chamy creates layered, dreamlike works that move between ancestral memory and speculative vision. Drawing on mystic archetypes—the truth-teller, the prophet, the outlaw—his practice blends painting, collage, and text into palimpsest-like surfaces where the sacred and the everyday, the theatrical and the intimate, continually translate one another. With a lens shaped by the Palestinian diaspora, his paintings search for the spaces where fable, history, and imagination converge. From spare watercolors to dense, maximalist portraits, Chamy’s work searches for the spaces where fable, history, and imagination converge.
BIOGRAPHY: Adam Chamy is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and architect based in Washington, DC. His art is deeply multidisciplinary incorporating a variety of media including short stories, found materials and mixed two dimensional media while always being in service of his unique otherworldly style and intersectional voice.
Chamy’s work has been shown at the United Nations East Gallery (NYC), Museo del Brigantaggio (Italy), and al-Quds Gallery (Washington, DC). His solo exhibition Of Refuge, Of Home was featured by NPR and The Washington Post. He is also the 2023 Half-Light Press Short Story Prize winner for The Two Halves House, a parable exploring themes of national borders and family myth-making architect based in Washington, DC. He received architectural training at the University of Maryland and focused on sociocultural anthropology, fine arts, and international affairs at the George Washington University.