Painting Ourselves Visible 2019 — Acrylics on wall, approx. 12 × 5 m. Hillsborough Community College Dale Mabry Campus, Tampa.
Commissioned by Art2Action Inc. and Gallery221@HCC for the Hillsborough Community College Dale Mabry Campus in Tampa — a permanent public mural funded through the Gobioff Foundation's Treasure Tampa creative placemaking grant. The project was conceived to raise the visibility of Arab, Middle Eastern, and North African communities in the Tampa Bay area: a large, diverse population that the city had not made visible in its public spaces.
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The mural draws on layered visual sources — Fayoum portraits, early Christian iconography, Roman sculpture, Mediterranean painting traditions — translated into a large-scale figurative work on the exterior wall of the campus humanities building. A saint-like figure in three-quarter profile, a gold halo, a body dissolving into a field of scattered marks in gold and grey: the image sits between devotional icon and contemporary portrait, between North African antiquity and a present-day face. The figure does not resolve into a single identity. That refusal is the point.
The commission followed an earlier collaboration with Art2Action and the USF Contemporary Art Museum as part of the THIS Bridge: Arab, Middle Eastern and Muslim Artists series (2015–16), where Tarek produced a temporary mural that prompted the invitation to return for a permanent work. The three-day public celebration of the completed mural included an outdoor screening of Microphone (dir. Ahmed Abdallah, 2010), a block party, a panel discussion on creative placemaking, and open workshops.
