Visual Artist
ADAM CHAMY
...that time we tried to catch the moon to make the night last forever...
... journey with me..
TWILIGHT
What does it mean to find moments of beauty for someone who struggles with sleep? artist and writer Adam Chamy explores sleep and time in “Twilight and Other Stories”.
As an insomniac for a decade, his works provides a window into his investigation of sleep with dreamlike mixed media works, written diary entries, and a site specific installation. His characteristic vibrant colors and expressive, contrasting tones take cues from observing the changing quality of light and color as day moves to night and waking moves to sleeping. His work uses found, often gossamer materials as well as flash fiction diaries to help decipher the often illusory moments between sleeping and awakening The resulting fantastical works invite viewers to join the artist in otherworldly dream-pop states of ecstasy or abandon.
and other stories...
The Empty Portraits
The Empty Portraits series engages the kuffiyeh as both a visual anchor and a vessel of memory. A symbol long associated with Palestinian identity and resistance, the kuffiyeh has, in the wake of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, become charged with both pride and controversy. While it stands as an emblem of solidarity, it is also used at times to flatten Palestinian identity.
These portraits celebrate the kuffiyeh’s enduring presence while honoring those rendered anonymous by war. Rather than depict literal faces, the works use embroidered patterns and textile language to suggest presence, dignity, and absence simultaneously.
Created in 2024 for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA USA) and as independent commissions in support of Palestinian solidarity. Prints of select smaller works are currently available. The series remains ongoing through private commission.
Reclaming is an evolving body of work exploring speculative memory, cultural inheritance, and mythmaking in contemporary life. Rather than retelling existing myths, these pieces imagine new ones—stories where personal narrative and ancestral echoes intertwine with the symbolic language of animals, memes, and icons.
Drawing from the long human tradition of encoding meaning into animal figures—from heraldry and totems to religious allegory—these works ask: what are the fables of our time? In this space, the lines between fable and identity dissolve. Each work becomes a site of reinvention—blurring the sacred and the mundane, the past and the speculative—to reclaim space for contradiction, humor, and radical possibility.
ADAM CHAMY
STATEMENT: Rooted in a lifelong struggle with insomnia and shaped by his identity as a queer Palestinian-Texan, Chamy channels mystic archetypes—the truth-teller, the prophet, the outlaw—to craft palimpsest-like visions that straddle ancestral memory and speculative dreaming. His work spans from minimalist watercolors meditating on land and culture to maximalist portraits and collages that blur fable and identity. Each piece becomes a site of translation: between the sacred and the mundane, the theatrical and the intimate, the visible and invisible.
BIOGRAPHY: Adam Chamy is a multidisciplinary queer Palestinian-American artist, writer, andAdam Chamy is a multidisciplinary queer Palestinian-American artist, writer, and architect based in Washington, DC. They received architectural training at the University of Maryland and focused on sociocultural anthropology, fine arts, and international affairs at the George Washington University. His art is deeply multidisciplinary incorporating a variety of media including short stories, found materials and mixed two dimensional media while always being in service of his unique otherworldly style and intersectional voice.
Chamy’s work has been shown at the United Nations East Gallery (NYC), Museo del Brigantaggio (Italy), and al-Quds Gallery (Washington, DC). His solo exhibition Of Refuge, Of Home was featured by NPR and The Washington Post. He is also the 2023 Half-Light Press Short Story Prize winner for The Two Halves House, a parable exploring themes of national borders and family myth-making architect based in Washington, DC. He received architectural training at the University of Maryland and focused on sociocultural anthropology, fine arts, and international affairs at the George Washington University. His art is deeply multidisciplinary incorporating a variety of media including short stories, found materials and mixed two dimensional media while always being in service of his unique otherworldly style and intersectional voice.
Chamy’s work has been shown at the United Nations East Gallery (NYC), Museo del Brigantaggio (Italy), and al-Quds Gallery (Washington, DC). His solo exhibition Of Refuge, Of Home was featured by NPR and The Washington Post. He is also the 2023 Half-Light Press Short Story Prize winner for The Two Halves House, a parable exploring themes of national borders and family myth-making