Exhibition Statement
Threads: The Art Exchange is pleased to present Thank You for the Flowers, a digital exhibition by Detroit-based artist Maryam Faison, opening May 12.
What does it mean to give someone their flowers while they can still hold them?
Flowers have long marked our most significant moments in life: grief, love, gratitude, and celebration, amongst many others. We send them to apologize to someone, as a romantic gesture, to someone who is grieving, or when we lay them at graves. Yet the gesture of giving flowers to someone still here, still becoming, still in full bloom, or simply just because, sits at the center of Maryam Faison’s exhibition and art practice.
Working in Procreate and Canva, Faison builds her digital collages through a meditative, intentional process rooted in botany, color therapy, and an expansive symbolic vocabulary drawn from the natural world. Each collage is assembled with patience and intention, and each carries its own voice and story. Faison rarely pairs words with her work and prefers the image to breathe and to read without translation. Color is chosen from feeling: vibrant reds, indigos, pinks, and yellows that function simultaneously as palette and emotional experience. Background, figure, and florals are built in deliberate sequence, each decision in conversation with the one before it.
Faison’s symbolic vocabulary is drawn entirely from the natural world, and each element earns its place. Birds, dragonflies, bees, and butterflies move through her work as carriers of ancestral memory - creatures unbounded by geography, traveling without limit, existing outside the walls we build for ourselves. Flowers, which return after every loss, hold grief and rebirth in the same breath. Hair becomes a landscape, a base from which plants and florals grow outward, merging the figure with the botanical world it inhabits. Faces are often left open or entirely absent, not as omission, but as an invitation for the viewer to stand inside the work.
Deeply influenced by Frida Kahlo for her self-insertion into the work, her unapologetic interiority, and her enduring use of florals, Faison shares a commitment to letting the work reflect what is felt rather than what is explained. Like Kahlo, she infuses herself into her practice, allowing mood, spirit, and lived experience to guide each composition. Where Kahlo rendered the self through portraiture, Faison extends that interiority outward into the natural world, into bloom, flight, and color that carries meaning before a single figure is named.
The presented work is an act of homage, a reclaiming of the flower as something offered in life, in the fullness of it, not only in its absence. The title of the exhibition is a reimagining, one that centers the gesture of giving on those who are still here: ancestors honored through memory, chosen family, and the women whose strength has been witnessed and the women whose strength has gone unnamed. At the heart of this work is a deep and deliberate devotion to women, and specifically to Black women. Faison has described her practice as angelic, futuristic, and softly feminine, a new visual culture built around presence rather than mourning, rendering Black womanhood, and womanhood in a register that is softer, freer, and more expansive than the narratives that have historically defined it.
Thank You for the Flowers closes with the question it opens with, who would you give your flowers to, while they are still here to receive them?
RELEASING MAY 12
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Images: Maryam Faison headshot (courtesy of the artist) | Flora - 2025, digital collage | Among the Moon - 2025, digital collage