Umar Rashid (b. 1976, Chicago, IL)
Umar Rashid—often working under the name Frohawk Two Feathers—constructs rich, layered pictorial narratives that remix history, myth, and contemporary experience. Through painting, drawing, sculpture, and illustration, he invades the terrain of colonial and imperial iconography, collapsing geography and chronology to stage an alternative world narrative. His invented “Frenglish Empire,” spanning eighteenth- and nineteenth-century domains, becomes a vehicle through which Rashid reimagines the entwined histories of race, class, power, and resistance. His work draws from Egyptian hieroglyphs, ledger art, Mughal miniatures, hip-hop visual culture, cosmological diagrams, and maps—often unified through a personal iconographic lexicon (including his “Imperial Tattoo System”) that acts as a mediator between past, present, and possible futures.
Rashid earned his BA in Cinema & Photography from Southern Illinois University (Carbondale) in 2000. Recent solo exhibitions include If there’s been a way to build it, There’ll be a way to destroy it… L’époque Totalitaire part one (Almine Rech, London, 2023), Ancien Regime Change 4, 5, and 6 (MoMA PS1, New York, 2022), In the Court of the Crimson Queen or White Woman on a Horse (Tiwani Contemporary, London, UK), and What Is the Color When Black Is Burned? (The Gold War Part 1) at the University of Arizona Museum of Art (2018). He has appeared in notable group exhibitions including Made in L.A. 2020: a version at the Hammer Museum & Huntington (2020), Seeing Is Believing: The Art and Influence of Gérôme (Mathaf, Qatar, 2024), and who’s afraid of cartoony figuration? (Dallas Contemporary, 2024).
Rashid has participated in residency programs such as the G.A.S. Foundation in Lagos in 2023, where he spent time reconnecting with ancestral environments and local visual traditions while deepening his narrative scope.
His works are held in numerous public and private collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Wellin Museum at Hamilton College, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Hudson River Museum, and the Nevada Museum of Art.
Rashid lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.