Downtown Ventura Welcomes Ghada Amer Art Installation

Ghada Amer recently had her art installation, Women’s Qualities, featured at the annual Desert X installation in the Coachella Valley. Now, we’re bringing that installation to Downtown Ventura, in partnership with the Ventura Botanical Gardens and the Museum of Ventura County.

Ghada was born in Cairo and is now based out of New York. She has a wide-ranging practice that spans painting, cast sculpture, ceramics, works on paper, and garden and mixed-media installations.
Recognizing that women are taught to model behaviors and traits shaped by others, and that art history — the history of painting, in particular — is largely shaped by expressions of masculinity, she subverts these frameworks through aesthetics and content. Her practice explores the complicated nature of identity as it is developed through cultural and religious norms as well as personal longings and understandings of the self.
With this grouping of words arranged throughout Downtown Ventura, she builds on her Women’s Qualities series, asking men and women throughout Ventura County to share words that describe the qualities with which they identify and to which they have been ascribed. It is an act of looking both inward and outward, yielding a form of self-portraiture.
To visit all of the Women’s Qualities installations throughout Ventura County, follow the map below. Special thanks to our partners, the Museum of Ventura County and the Ventura Botanical Garden.
