Time-Honored Non-Specifics

Through a range of practices, each artist in Time-Honored Non-Specifics demonstrates an interest in the ways meaning accrues, migrates, and is sometimes deliberately obscured. Across ceramics, textiles, painting, found objects, and virtual environments, Bulumko Mbete, Naomi Chambers, and Afrooz Partovi each attend to the ways objects and sites carry histories that are both intimate and politically charged. Their work insists that materials are not neutral: they are repositories of trade and migration, of kinship and care, of censorship and erasure.

Chambers, a Pittsburgh-born painter and assemblage sculptor, roots her work in community histories and Black feminist modes of care, and her practice reflects years of collaboration, mentorship, and collective organizing. Mbete, a multidisciplinary artist from South Africa, draws from textile traditions and craft methodologies practiced by women in Southern Africa, engaging them as living archives of generational knowledge and contemporary realities. Partovi, an artist-architect from Iran, explores absence, disappearance, and the porous boundaries between physical and digital space, using immersive technologies to surface overlooked histories and intangible forms of memory.

Grounded in three years of research, this exhibition presents the final thesis work of these MFA candidates. Now in its second year at The Andy Warhol Museum, the exhibition continues a growing partnership between the museum and the Carnegie Mellon School of Art, placing these artists within the legacy of one of the School's most influential alumni.

Participating artists
Afrooz Partovi is an artist-architect who explores intangible dimensions of time and space through immersive technologies and time-based media. Her work delves into absences as vessels to trace what has been forgotten, erased, or transformed into nonexistence. Digital realms serve as both medium and metaphor in this exploration, challenging the primacy of physicality as the definitive marker of presence. Her work explores how the recontextualization of absences in digital realms can uncover deeper narratives of resistance and resilience.

Naomi Chambers is a painter and assemblage sculptor born in Pittsburgh in 1987. After receiving an undergraduate degree in Studio Arts and Marketing, she took the leap to be a full-time artist in 2013. In 2017, she worked with a collective of artists to open FlowerHouse, a community art studio and creative space in Wilkinsburg offering workshops and classes to the predominantly Black community. In 2017, she was also awarded the Investing In Professional Artist grant from the Heinz Endowment and Pittsburgh Foundation.

Born in 1995 on a serendipitous Saturday, Bulumko Mbete is a creative practitioner with multicultural heritage. She is based in liminal spaces. Bulumko Mbete undertakes research in different forms of craft and design methodologies which are predominantly performed by women in Southern Africa. Her current research focuses on this form of craft and design as indigenous knowledge systems and archives. Her work is influenced by this mode of storytelling and production. She creates a framework to communicate generational traditions and gestures of love using textile, beading, natural dyeing and weaving.

The Carnegie Mellon School of Art MFA Program is an interdisciplinary, experimental, research-based program that provides students with a challenging and supportive context to expand and develop their work and thinking as artists. As one of the top-ranked graduate programs in the country, the School views art-making as a vital social, critical, and intellectual pursuit. Graduate students are encouraged to employ a comparative and intersectional approach to critical and cultural theories, and to allow this inquiry to inform and expand what it means to be an artist and to make art within the contemporary condition.