Whenever my best friend and I notice an actor, whom we’ve never seen before, do something on screen that carves a tunnel to the center of our human experience, we always turn to each other and say, “Who the fuck was that?” This initiates a series of happy protocols: first, we replay the moment three or four times (or until our bodies have memorized it) with running commentary about why it’s so amazing, then we begin furiously IMDBing and Googling to learn as much about the actor as we can. The real question is, Who is this person that we don’t recognize but who seems to recognize a part of us? Only then, once we’ve located the person, and after we’ve exchanged their name between our lips, are we able to resume watching.

Something similar happened to me a few weeks ago when I was alone, absent-mindedly scrolling through Instagram.¹ An image of a street mural grabbed me with two hands, causing me to exclaim, out loud to an empty room, “Who the fuck did that?” I felt seen by someone who had never seen me, and I wanted to understand why. I immediately set out to discover whatever I could about the artist, Habiba Abdul Rahim.

Before she and I had a chance to speak, I went to see her mural, which I later discovered was the first mural she’d ever painted.² It’s located in inner Southeast Portland—a historically industrial area, which, like every other part of town that retains even a whisper of its original character, is five minutes away from being gentrified. I expected to linger in the street awhile, to take photos of the mural from every angle, observing it from up close and far away. When I arrived, the street facing the mural was filled with tents and stoves, makeshift hangouts, sheets drawn over car windows for privacy. All was quiet, but it felt perverse to document anything, as if I had barged into someone’s home unannounced, pulled out my iPhone, and started taking pictures of the art on their walls. I was overwhelmed with a sense that the mural was not meant for me.

That sense grew clearer when Abdul Rahim told me about her experience scouting the site for the first time: “When I got out there and I saw the space and I looked over at the unhoused and how they made that space their home, I wanted the colors to evoke happiness and maybe take them to another place.” She went on, “When I was younger my father used to always say, ‘Keep one eye open, you know, always be vigilant, always watch what's going on around you,’ and I started thinking, Well, who is watching over these people that are out here?”

Abdul Rahim painted two women, each with one eye always open, who would watch over the community. A descendent of the Gullah/Geechee people, who have a strong focus on community healing, she said that the watchers also represent the woman she wants to be and the kind of elder she hopes to become. She told me about her daily routine while she was working on the mural: whenever she needed to use the restroom or get coffee, she walked down to one man’s tent to ask him if he needed anything. He usually said no but offered to sit with her stuff until she came back. When she returned, he’d stay with her and they’d talk about painting and how the mural was coming along. So, I can’t help but feel that the piece also includes the way the community watched over her, too.

I need to tell you something before we go any further because, if you’re anything like me, you may need to hear it twice: Abdul Rahim has only been painting for two years. And until seven years ago—newly married with an infant and two kids—she hadn’t so much as picked up a drawing pen.

“What led me into art was a period of time where I was bedridden,” she says. “It was like this illness hit me and I lost myself. All of my hair fell out, [I was] losing bone structure in my jaw. My husband at the time would have to get me up and dress me, bathe me, and help me to the restroom.” He started bringing pads and pens to her bedside. “He put it on the bed and I'm like ‘What is this? What do you want me to do with this?’” she laughs thinking about it. “You think it's a cliche when you hear folks say art saved my life. It really mentally, physically, spiritually saved me. He saw something in me that I didn't even see.” Abdul Rahim continued to draw, but didn’t put brush to canvas—here it is again for you—until two years ago.

The glorious thing about self-taught artists is that no one has told them the “right” way to do something, so they get to figure out for themselves that whatever way their art wants to come through them is the right way. For Abdul Rahim, the colors arrive first. She knows every color that’s going to be in a composition before she has any idea what she’s painting. The colors evoke a feeling that guides her creation of a Spotify playlist (90s rock, R&B, and rap, with a little 80s³ mixed in), which she listens to over and over and over until the music and colors conspire to tell her what to make. It’s a highly intuitive process—which art school would have done its damndest to beat out of her or prevent from ever taking shape in the first place—that lends her work an assurance of line and style that reached out and slapped me through my phone when I first saw it.

Abdul Rahim knew she wanted to paint women of color, “in hopes,” she says, “that other women can find some small thing and identify with that. ‘Oh, her nose is shaped like mine, and that looks beautiful so my nose must look beautiful. Her lips are a little fuller, mine are full and I never know if they are beautiful but that up there is beautiful, so my lips must be beautiful.’” The patent strength of the women in her compositions is an homage to the women in her family.

She also paints parts of herself into her work. The grey figures represent the artist’s desire to blend in, to sometimes disappear. The distinct tilted head position, which I assumed was a hallmark of her work is, actually, new. As she tells it, “the head to the side is where I'm at, trying to figure things out, in particular after Covid. Everything that I felt I knew and thought mattered—it doesn't matter at all.” She adds, “I'm also trying to figure out all these labels that we make for ourselves: what being a woman is, what being Black is, what being Muslim is. I haven't figured those labels out.”

Something I love about the way that art travels through the world and through our skin is that we don’t have to be the intended audience for an artist’s work in order for it to penetrate to the deepest part of us. I appreciate Abdul Rahim’s figures because they are a reflection of a human being who, like me, is in the process of honoring and healing, questioning and becoming.

You can commission work from Habiba for between $75-$425. More info here.

As promised, I’m building a growing list of incredible pieces of art for under $1000, with a focus on queer, BIPOC, and women artists. I’ll be adding to it regularly, so check back often and feel feel to share it with friends.