[ Music plays ] Dweck: The exhibition is called "Reciting Women," and it brings together the work of two artists who are deeply rooted in the Trenton community.

The exhibition looks at the similarities between Alia Bensliman and Khalilah Sabree's work, in that they're both drawing on the tradition of geometric pattern found in Islamic art and architecture, and they're both, as I hope this exhibition will show, harnessing painting as a way to foster empathy and understanding.

But aside from the similarities, there are a lot of differences between the two artists' work.

So, Khalilah Sabree's series "Destruction of a Culture" draws on her personal journey as an African American Muslim to raise really weighty questions about human suffering and cultural disintegration.

Meanwhile, Alia's series of North African women celebrates the indigenous Amazigh tradition of personal adornment, which she's familiar with from her native Tunisia.

Steward: We have always exhibited faith.

The works of the Italian Renaissance are, generally speaking, works of faith.

It is, I think, in this moment, especially fraught, trying to do so.

What maybe guides us to the selection are artists who are under-known, but whose work we think is worth paying attention to.

Bensliman: My name is Alia Bensliman.

I am a visual artist, contemporary artist, and I paint with intricate lines, and I also do portrait art.

I was born and raised in Tunisia.

Tunisia is in north of Africa.

It's a small country, slightly bigger than New Jersey state.

I wanted to talk about indigenous women from North Africa, specifically young North African women.

So, I imagine, and I also get inspired by photographs of Amazigh women, and I showcase their traditional clothing and traditional jewelry, but also I showcase their facial tattoo, their body tattoo.

The art of tattooing Amazigh have a lot of meaning.

The more you get tattooed, the better ranking you have, and also it talks about a story.

So, the more tattoos you get in your body, the larger story you talk about your life.

Dweck: Alia focuses on the Amazigh people, who are the indigenous inhabitants of North Africa, who have been present in the Maghreb since antiquity.

And so, Alia, who claims some Amazigh heritage, celebrates this really strong visual culture by painting these portraits of sort of imagined -- imagined North African women.

Bensliman: I grew up where religion is so obvious in my family.

For me, it's not only being Muslim as a religion, being Muslim also as culturally.

I embrace that, and I wanted to use it in my art in a sense where I wanted to include the Islamic geometry with the portraits.

I wanted to show the past and the future fused together in my work.

Dweck: For Alia, as a... perhaps you could say secular Muslim, faith is very much about tradition.

It's about family, it's about continuity, and it's also about visual culture.

For Khalilah, faith is about her being a devout Muslim.

It is about practice.

It is about spirituality.

It's about text and about prayer.

Sabree: My name is Khalilah Sabree, and I am an artist.

I'm a Muslim artist, and I am also a mixed-media person.

I use photography, drawing, painting to create works that are very personal to me and that express my concern for world culture.

Dweck: Her series "Destruction of a Culture" was originally called "The Hajj Series," and Khalilah has made this pilgrimage to Mecca several times.

In 2004, she took a photograph while she was making Hajj of two African women, covered in hijab, staring away from the Kaaba toward the modern city of Mecca.

She reproduced it.

She enlarged it on a copier in black and white, over which she layered paint and ink and pen and print.

If you were to line them up, you would see a continuity of line, but also a dramatic show of progression in increasing darkness and a sort of play with visibility and invisibility of the women's figures in the painting.

Sabree: They're more about the emotion.

They're not about a specific place or a particular people.

It's about how things and your life can change in an instant.

It's about the crumbling of a society.

It's also a spiritual catharsis for me, where I can -- things that I think about can come out onto the canvas.

Events in the world, in Africa and Asia and other places where war occurs, those things are feeding me, also, visually.

It's showing the buildings falling.

And I think about the people under the rubble and what that might be like.

I have always been a searcher.

I studied religion in college at Trenton State College, the College of New Jersey, on that journey, but as fate would have it, I met someone at TCNJ who was a Muslim, and that's how it all started.

It's the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

Being a Muslim... ...has brought definition to a lot of things that I did not understand.

Dweck: Both of their work is deeply personal.

It reflects on their identities as Muslim American women and on their journeys of belonging.

But at the same time, both of their work ask really big questions about cultural disintegration, cultural preservation, and cultural identity.

Steward: These artists are being exhibited in our space, in part because they work on multivalent bases.

Their work is in part about faith.

I think it's also about their historical identity as women.

It's about their identity as teachers, as visual artists.

Dweck: Whether it's about faith or whether it's about storytelling, it's about finding one's voice.

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