Family Day | Shorelines

About the Event

This month, dip your toes into the work of Firelei Báez with activities led by artist Farah Salem.

Designed for children under 12 and their grown-ups, MCA Family Days invite our youngest visitors to be the museum’s artists, thinkers, and collaborators.

About the Artist

Farah Salem (b. 1991, Kuwait) is an interdisciplinary artist and somatic art therapist; these two practices exist independently, yet are intertwined as her professional training informs her artistic inquiry of how trauma manifests in the body. Her visual arts practice rooted in photography expands through video, performance, and installation finding subtle affinities between geologic time, somatic movement, gendered trauma, and Arabian Peninsula ceremonial healing rituals. Through relational merging and mapping of human and geologic bodies, she envisions their liberation by examining themes of agency, making the invisible visible, and the potential erosion of socio-cultural conditioning. Farah holds an MA in Art Therapy and Counseling from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Farah completed the Radicle Studio Residency at Hyde Park Art Center, Hatch Residency at Chicago Artist Coalition, ACRE Artist Residency, Per|Form at Contemporary Art Platform (Kuwait), and Journey to Turkey Residency with Crossway Foundation (UK). Farah is the recipient of the 2024 3Arts Award, 2024 Illinois Arts Accelerator Fund Award, and is the 2017 Laureate Winner: International Women Photographers Award.