Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Textile, sculpture
Website: whaleblah.com
Mansur Nurullah was born in 1972 in Chicago, Illinois, and has lived and worked in San Francisco for many years. He received a BA from the University of New Mexico and an MS in Counseling with a Counseling Credential from San Francisco State University. In addition to his art practice, he works as a counselor for suspended and expelled youth at a San Francisco Unified School District alternative school site. He has been awarded residencies at Recology San Francisco (2019) and, through the San Francisco Arts Commission, the San Francisco Planning Department (2020–21). He is an affiliate artist at Minnesota Street Projects. He is represented by Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco, where he had his first solo exhibition in 2024. He has been profiled by the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco and featured in exhibitions at the San Francisco Arts Commission.
Nurullah makes intricate, large-scale textile sculptures and wall-hanging works built from discarded clothing, upholstery samples, found road signs, bits of fur, disassembled shoes and handbags, speaker wire, and other detritus of daily life. Building on the legacies of African American quilt makers, his works trace personal, familial, and community histories — including the 1921 Tulsa Greenwood Massacre and the generational trauma of anti-Black violence — while also charting his own literal and metaphorical navigations through San Francisco on foot and by bicycle. He moves through the city daily and describes plotting one’s course as a metaphor for finding one’s place in the world. His SFAC Planning residency involved weekly bike rides through San Francisco’s Central, South, and Southeast corridors with a city planner, visiting sites of development and engaging residents — a process he described as both research and ethical practice. The resulting work was exhibited at the SF Arts Commission Main Gallery alongside Trina Michelle Robinson, a fellow artist in this wiki.
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