Upcoming Exhibitions
Shabnam Jannesari "I Shall Bring You to the Garden's Edge"
September 17, 2026 – October 21, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 17, 2026 from 5:30 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Artist Talk: Thursday, September 17, 2026, 5 p.m. in Cultural Arts Building Room 2033
Shabnam Jannesari is a distinguished Iranian artist whose work has been widely exhibited across the United States and internationally. She earned her Master of Fine Arts (MFA), with honors, from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
Her solo exhibition She Sat Where the Light Awaited is on view at the Erie Art Museum (Erie, PA) from September 2025 through March 2026. Recent exhibitions include Made in the Plains at the Joslyn Art Museum (Omaha, NE, 2025) and Look but Look with Love, a two-person show at the NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NY, 2024).
She has presented solo exhibitions such as Each String is a Thread, Each Color a Chord at the Nebraska Arts Council (Omaha, NE) and The Carpet Grew Like a Garden at Gallery 263 (Cambridge, MA). Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions including the Mid-Atlantic Biennial at the University of Mary Washington (VA), A Pot Nudged into Oblivion at Miranda Art Project Space (NYC), Narrative Imperative at the University of Connecticut, and Domestic State at Wheaton College (MA).
Her paintings are held in both private and institutional collections, including Fidelity Investments and the University of Massachusetts School of Law.
Jannesari’s work explores the struggles and resilience of Iranian women, addressing themes of identity, memory, and societal expectation.
She is a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2020, 2022) and the Distinguished Art Fellowship at UMass Dartmouth (2018–2021). In 2025, she was selected for the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency.
She currently serves as Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
Dominique Muñoz: Myth in Patterns
January 14, 2027 – February 17, 2027
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 14, 2027 from 5:30 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Artist Talk: Thursday, January 14, 2027, 5 p.m. in Cultural Arts Building Room 2033
From birth, fabric cradles us—soft, worn, and imbued with care, a second skin that shields us from the world. In the exhibition, Myth in Patterns, Dominique Muñoz treats blankets and textiles in his photography-based practice not just as materials but as vessels of memory carried across generations, borders, and homes. Drawing from his Guatemalan heritage, Muñoz subverts the conventions of portraiture, challenging both the colonial and heteronormative histories of the medium.
In collaboration with his family, he constructs highly staged images within his studio and childhood homes, arranging blankets and their patterns in mesmerizing layers – queering the domestic space. These environments raise questions about traditional gendered expectations, becoming sites of fluidity and play. Cared for by the matriarchs in his family, these fabrics hold the weight of cultural identity. The vibrant motifs embed Mesoamerican mythologies as a form of knowledge, preserving and remixing traditional Guatemalan symbols and patterns. Photographic tools—C-stands, spring clamps—are left visible, exposing the mechanics of image-making, blurring the lines between authenticity and artifice. Mirrors, positioned behind the hand-cut silhouettes, shift the viewer’s perspective, revealing the textiles draped just beyond the camera’s gaze. These silhouettes punctuate his compositions allowing new patterns to emerge, echoing the fabrics that have shaped him. Muñoz embraces excess, not as something to be tamed but as a mode of joyful resistance. These aesthetic choices are not merely decorative; they assert the value of cultural expressions often dismissed as ‘tacky’ or excessive.
A wooden pallet, balanced precariously within the installation, echoes the instability of imposed structures—the rigid frameworks individuals are expected to navigate. It becomes a site of both constraint and possibility, mirroring the tensions of migration, identity formation, and gender roles. The peacock feathers serves as a symbol of beauty and masculinity while referencing a journey navigating traditional expectations. Scattered around the gallery space are handwoven baskets using alternative photographic process called cyanotype to reweave the patterns into new objects that hold audio files of his grandmothers voice.
Myth in Patterns examines how histories of care and migration shape identity, ultimately questioning how we continue to remake home in ever-changing landscapes.
Biography Dominique Muñoz is a Guatemalan-American visual artist working in photography, printmaking, and installation. His practice examines how cultural traditions adapt, fracture, and persist through migration, reweaving pattern and light as collaborators in that inquiry. He considers how assimilation, queerness, and cultural survival entangle, using visibility as a conceptual framework to challenge photography's colonial and heteronormative histories. Dominique earned his MFA in Studio Art from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2025 and his BFA in Photography and Film from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015. He currently is a fellow with the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. He was named the 2025 Denis Roussel Fellow at the Center for Fine Art Photography and has attended residencies at Storm King Art Center, ACRE Projects, and Ox-Bow School of Art as a LeRoy Neiman Fellow. His work has been exhibited in numerous galleries, including Provincetown Arts Association Museum (Provincetown, MA), The Greenville Museum of Art (Greenville, NC), Silver Eye Center for Photography (Pittsburgh, PA), The National Building Museum (Washington, DC), Heaven Gallery (Chicago, IL) and Lump Gallery (Raleigh, NC) www.dominiquemunoz.com
Contact the CAB Art Gallery
Monday – Friday: 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. with extended gallery hours Thursdays until 7 p.m.
(Closed November 26-28 for Thanksgiving)
Summer Hours: Monday – Thursday: 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. (Closed Friday)