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Wednesday, January 22, 2025 — Houston, TX

Saba Feleke makes art you can’t scroll past

courtesy-saba-feleke
Courtesy Saba Feleke

By Chi Pham     1/21/25 10:36pm

Outside Saba Feleke’s senior art studio, a large scroll painting hangs on the wall bearing the statement: “My 5-year plan is that a Bible-level miracle will happen.” The painting is a recreation of a screenshot of a post on Feleke’s Instagram, which itself is a screenshot of a Twitter post — only much larger, they said. It is part of a series of paintings created during Feleke’s summer residency at Project Row Houses through the Floyd Newsum Summer Studios Program.

Other paintings in the series depict similar internet ephemera, such as the ‘go piss girl’ meme and an ad for an online game Feleke reposted on Instagram to intentionally “flop,” they said.

“I’m very interested right now in alternative uses of the internet and also in ways we can use it that aren’t just going to feed into the attention economy and make big corporations money,” Feleke said. “The [scroll painting] is a physical recreation of a digital object, just to highlight the real and visceral and physical effects that social media can have on us and the ways these ideas and memes have effects on the real world. With ‘go piss girl’ in particular, the amount of times that people say ‘go piss girl’ in response to somebody going to the bathroom and … not even know that they’re referencing this digital image.”



Inside their studio, a found-object sculpture using a section of highway railing and metal chain rests against a wall. On a table lie a series of what Feleke calls “glitch paintings,” which are colorful recreations of digital glitches. Taped to the walls are texts that inform Feleke’s practice, including two sets of ten: David J. Getsy’s “Ten Queer Theses on Abstraction” and Corita Kent’s “Ten Rules for Students and Teachers.”

“10 is a good number for rules,” Feleke said. “One of [Getsy’s theses] is ‘Capacity and openness are not the same as ambiguity. Refuse ambiguity.’ … It highlights the ways in which saying ‘Oh, everything’s ambiguous. Art is just subjective’ [is inaccurate] because I think something that I’ve been learning in my art practice is just that … some choices are better than other choices … you don’t really get a choice into being ambiguous. You’re always choosing something over another thing.”

During the summer, Feleke interned for Meow Wolf’s art team in Houston and worked with YouTuber CJ The X on their Kill The Internet project. Outside of visual art, Feleke said they are passionate about sound, which led them to collaborate with classmate Devin Gonzalez and professor Devin Mays on Sound & Situation, a project exploring sound as an artistic medium.

“The sound project was [pitched] to me by Devin Gonzalez, [a DJ and electrical engineer], and I was taking a class with Devin Mays,” Feleke said. “We met maybe once or twice a month last semester and … played around with speakers and put [them] in weird places on campus, and then played some music that Devin Gonzalez made, and talked about what that … did to certain spaces, [like] the Cambridge [Parking Lot].”

Reflecting on their time at Rice, Feleke said they’ve been involved in various performance groups and events, including RASA Dance, Africayé, Lovett Theater, Rice Chorale and their band Saba & the Ex-Boyfriends. They also founded the Black Art Collective through the Dr. Bill Wilson Student Initiative Grant, which they continue to facilitate.

“We’re doing a lot of planning [for events] next semester and even the fall after I graduate, fingers crossed, just to platform Black artists and have more conversations around art that aren’t being had,” Feleke said. “There’s [theater and poetry] people on the team, and then there's [artists, architects and engineers], so it’s very interdisciplinary ... I’m really excited to put on events with them [that] people can be on the lookout for.”

Feleke said that a life-changing moment for them at Rice had been performing the Saba & the Ex-Boyfriends set at Soul Night. 

“I remember I was feeling very sick,” Feleke said. ‘But then … the audience was very engaged and was singing the words back in a way that was just very cathartic and meaningful. You can spend all this time alone, working on art by yourself, but something happens when you show it to people, and then something else happens when the audience is engaged in the way that you would want and just singing along.” 

Feleke, who is double majoring in mechanical engineering and visual arts, said that their interest in both fields is not as disparate as it might seem.

“I'm interested in the ways in which art and engineering can be used to make tools that people can use and grab on to, whether that be a program that helps you … search up things or a painting that helps you patch things up with your mom,” Feleke said. “Art and technology aren't that different … both are integral to the human experience.”

Feleke has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Carlson Undergraduate Research Fellowship, Elizabeth Lee Moody Research Fellowship in the Humanities and the Arts, the Mary Ellen Hale Lovett Travel Fellowship and the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing’s Phil Layton Award of Excellence in the Arts.

“Finding out that the engineering department had [the Phil Layton Award] for interdisciplinary work and people [who] were … focused on art has been really motivating,” Feleke said. “[I]t’s really hard just because the engineering degree is so rigorous to feel like you have time or space to do things outside of it, especially for someone who’s a [first-generation, low-income] student. ”

Before declaring a major in art in their sophomore year, Feleke said Josh Bernstein’s Beginning Drawing class was a transformative experience that pushed them to see themself as an artist.

“I just remember Josh asking me every once in a while in class, [when] I’d talk about art [or] the piece I was working on, ‘What major are you again?’” Feleke said. “And then I’d be like, ‘Mechanical engineering.’ And then he asked me again and again … it became a recurring bit.” 

Josh Bernstein, an associate teaching professor of art, reflects on his first interactions with Feleke.

“I met [Saba] in Beginning Drawing when they were still only a [mechanical engineering] major, and it was immediately apparent that they were an artist,” Bernstein wrote in an email to the Thresher.  “What’s exciting, though, is that I couldn’t have predicted — and still can’t predict — exactly what sort of artist they’re becoming. [Saba] is talented but also voracious, and every new idea or text or artist they come across becomes a new possibility in their own work.”

Feleke said their senior thesis, which includes figure drawings, cyanotype works and paintings, is interested in communication technologies and social media and their relationship to art, value and labor.

“I’m chronically online,” Feleke said. “I have a relationship with the internet, as probably most people do at our age, that can be very maladaptive, but also very empowering … I just think the amount of text that we see on a day-to-day basis and the amount of images is just crazy … in relation to the ways in which it changes the ways that we [write, draw and look] at images. ”

Feleke said they encourage underclassmen at Rice not to be afraid to make full use of the resources available to them.

“You’re already paying for them, so you might as well take advantage of them,” Feleke said. “[Take] art classes because we have such amazing faculty and people that you wouldn’t have access to otherwise. [Take] something outside of your major. [Go] to [the Wellbeing and Counseling Center, SAFE Office or Office of Student Success Initiatives]. [Go] to a yoga class at the [Recreation Center] ... they’re yours to use and take advantage of. Your job as a student is to be a parasite and suck all of the value you can out of your teachers and your institution.”



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