Artist Profile: Zakariya H. Gladney ’27 on Pictures, Know-how, and Activism | Arts

Zakiriya H. Gladney ’27 is a junior at Harvard College concentrating in Social Studies and Statistics who additionally produces and creates visible artwork within the type of images. This previous yr, Gladney was awarded the 2025 Artist Development Fellowship from the Harvard University Office for the Arts, beforehand successful the YoungerArts award as one in all 20 U.S. Presidential Scholars in 2023 within the arts.

Gladney — who is without doubt one of the Crimson Editorial Chairs — earned the 2025 Fellowship amongst 10 different college students on the faculty. Each of those college students obtained awards in numerous classes, with separations primarily based on visible arts, music, multi-disciplinary work, and literature. Gladney — who received within the Visual Arts class — labels himself as a photographer, noting the time that he has spent with the medium of images.

“I just began with taking pictures on my phone as like a middle schooler,” stated Gladney in an interview with the Crimson. “And I got more serious about it in high school.”

Gladney’s work usually displays a documentary focus, capturing items as they stand in separate factors of time. This pursuit began with city landscapes inside his hometown of Tucson, Arizona, earlier than increasing to different areas occupying the night time — like gasoline stations and comfort shops.

Some of Gladney’s earlier work — resembling his picture collections from Tunisia and Crust — additional focuses on and asks questions on his place throughout the world.

“I sort of reflected on, ‘What is that figure of this Black man in the nighttime urban environment?,’ and using my own body as a canvas,” Gladney stated. “And that project earned me the YoungArts award.”

Gladney’s choice to use for the ADF fellowship was largely influenced by its accessibility to a scholar not learning artwork itself. As a Social Studies and Statistics concentrator, Gladney would have problem pursuing a extra conventional arts schooling on campus as his course work didn’t deal with the technical facet of images.

“It sounded like the most straightforward way to get involved and to get a large amount of time in my undergraduate years dedicated, especially because I don’t study art directly,” stated Gladney.

Over the previous summer time break, Gladney was capable of put collectively an actual targeted venture. He used his ADF fellowship grant to journey to raised perceive the way in which city areas, visiting Jordan and Tunisia, have been affected by modernity.

“I felt like getting funding for the summer was sort of the best way to really dive in,” stated Gladney.

The ADF fellowship gave Gladney new alternatives to foster his personal creativity. It supplied him with the chance to be taught extra about particular images methods, such because the photogravure course of, which he discovered in Jordan beneath Palestinian printmaker Tariq Dajani.

Other alternatives, like at MIT and scholar exhibitions on the OFA, have given him the time and adaptability to create prints of his personal work.

“Over the past couple of months, I take the time to go to actually a studio at MIT and print out some of my work,” stated Gladney. “Some of it has been presented at the OFA’s like student exhibitions.”

Besides an artist, Gladney can also be a really distinguished activist, with stances being taken out into the scene on campus or inside his articles for The Crimson. However, Gladney notes that he personally interacts with artwork not inherently for any purpose.

“Art making is a fundamentally human activity, that we all creatively express ourselves in different ways,” stated Gladney. “For me, I do art mainly because of that.”

Despite this distinction, an artist can discover that their photos or different artworks nonetheless have political messages embedded in them. In Gladney’s expertise, artwork is extra more likely to be extra political than initially supposed. For Gladney, the character of politics inside his artwork is consequence of a life that’s, irreducibly, political.

“I am Black, Palestinian and Iraqi, and there’s not much way for me to make work and then not find that at the other side of things, that my work hasn’t taken on some kind of political character,” stated Gladney.

As of now, Gladney has been engaged on initiatives which are primarily based in technoscientific artwork to raised perceive the questions surrounding the pc itself.

“What is the meaning of computers and computation?” stated Gladney. “In what ways can we take up some of these things as techniques to produce work?”

Gladney views artwork as a medium for reflecting the technological world itself.

“I think that, in general, art has to take up the task in this moment to sort of better think through technology rather than sort of maybe reject it,” stated Gladney.

In this vein, Gladney has loads of concepts for the long run, which embrace concepts that middle subjects of surveillance, AI, science, and computation.

“I’m interested in doing more work that uses computational and scientific methods, but using it to investigate questions of like, ‘What moment of political power are we in?,’ and trying to understand things like contemporary authoritarian politics and surveillance and tracking and breaches of data privacy,” stated Gladney. “To both understand and then also to speak out against the practices.”

Overall, Gladney’s artwork is essentially pushed by a course of to carry out what he describes as his personal analysis course of.

“I’m interested in art as a way of thinking through and creating knowledge,” stated Gladney.

—Staff author Neeraja S. Kumar will be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X @neerajasrikumar.