"MARIYAH SULTAN" BIOGRAPHY

Mariyah Sultan (also known as Maria Sultan) is an New York artist with studios in both New York and North Carolina.  Sultan received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film from New York University- School of the Arts, and in 1987 worked on an MFA in a program adjoined with the San Francisco Art Institute.  Although closely identified with the Abstract Expressionists, the years living and painting in San Francisco helped define and develop her particular vocabulary of line, form, and color.  Sultan, deeply influenced by the work of Richard Diebenkorn and the California School, returned to New York where she opened a studio in the East Village.  Soon after,  Sultan  created  an urban art project in Spanish Harlem for Latin American youth struggling against drug and gang involvement - giving creative voice and safe haven to their individual  and collective experience through the visual  arts.  This indelibly affected and impacted  her life and her art, and is reflected in her paintings.  Mariyah Sultan received her training at The Art Students League of New York and the Woodstock School of Art.

Mariyah Sultan, presently showing in galleries in New York, Miami's Art District, Key West and Atlanta, is an emerging artistic force and her work is collected internationally.  Sultan will be exhibiting during Art Basil - Miami for the fourth time in the 2017 / 2018 showing.  Her work has been used on the sets of HBO, CBS, CW and Nickelodeon.  Sultan has recently been named Curator of Art at CBS in New York and her work has hung in the corporate headquarters.

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Sultan's connection to the New York School of Abstract Expressionists and the Cobra Movement has caused her to push the envelope of immediate expression within the context of the complexity of the current atmospheric condition and culture she finds herself in.  With unabashed freedom, Sultan incorporates brilliant splashes of rich color, flat planes, the subtle variance of textured grays, small elegant childlike lines that read as a language, a forceful linear structure, and the beauty of the female anatomy as the elemental potency of her paintings and drawings.  "I prefer the displacement of space, conceptually like writing on a wall.  I am obsessed with rich color and for me this is a journey unto itself."  Mariyah Sultan has won several awards and is a 2-time winner of the best of the Arts Students League of New York.  In 2015, Mariyah Sultan had a one-woman show at the Sechrest Gallery in North Carolina's prestigious High Point University, where she has also lectured on contemporary art.