CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/27/2026

Gateways to other realms in 'Uman: After all the things'

melancholia in a snowy walk (2025) is from new release Uman: After all the things..., published to accompany the Mogadishu-born artist’s first solo museum exhibition, on view now at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Clothbound with beautiful foil stamping of the artist’s hand-drawn cover, this is also the first major book about her work. Uman “compares the ‘heaven’ of the secluded beauty of Turkana, one of the oldest regions on the planet and where she spent time as a child with an aunt, to her surroundings now in the tiny rural town in upstate New York where she has lived for fifteen years,” Amy Smith-Stewart writes. “These two places on opposite sides of the globe and in starkly contrasting environments serve as her muses and guideposts. As gateways to other realms, geography and time in Uman’s art are fluid and elastic. Abstract and symbolic descriptions drift and circulate sinuously. The power of her vision is its capacity to feel and adapt so deeply and intuitively.”