West Seattle Art Walk

Rajaa Gharbi is an international visual and literary artist. She was born and raised in Tunisia and was a national puppet theatre artist there until she moved to Morocco where she has lived and worked for five years. She has been holding solo exhibitions and participating as featured artist in group shows in US galleries, universities and museums since 1984. Gharbi’s painting and literary works have been published, presented, critiqued and anthologized by art curators and scholars from the United States, the Middle East and Africa, including Tunisia’s National Television, radio and print media, National Public Radio (NPR), the Espace Culturel at the embassy of Tunisia, Washington DC, Cairo University, Egypt, Rutgers, Columbia and Seattle Universities, and Connecticut College, Bumbershoot’s International Readers program, Bellevue Art Museum, Seattle’s Municipal Tower Art Gallery and Central Library, The Northwest African-American Museum, the Museum of History and Industry, Elliott Bay Book Company, Langston Hughes Arts Center, Town Hall, l’Alliance Francaise, Edmond, Washington Black Box Theatre, and other art venues and publishers. Gharbi’s work is in numerous collections.

Gharbi’s surrealistic paintings start out as impulsive renditions of thoughts and intuitions and become somewhat more conscious visual narratives that have been described as having subversive compositional techniques, resplendent, enchanting, thought-provoking, engaging, visual poetry.

“I paint with layers of water based acrylics, inks, pencil and glass. Mythologies, hidden music and stories of almost-bygone or still alive languages, music itself, and human experience and its poetics inspire most of my paintings. Faces of mother nature- be they the infinite hues of my native Mediterranean’s turquoise waters, shifting golds and dreamy mauves of sunsets and sunrises, the singular red of human and animal blood, or the magnetic tones of green in any healthy forest or neighborhood garden, often influence my palette”. 

Gharbi has served as panelist/juror for Artist Trust’s Fellowship Awards and Bumbershoot’s literary programs. She is a member of the Tunisian Union of Fine Artists, the Academy of American Poets and Poetas del Mundo, Washington Lawyers for the Arts, and Antioch University Alumni Council. She is a contributing artist to Artist Trust, PONCHO and West Edge Sculpture.

Rajaa Gharbi Studios

4401 42nd Ave SW