ON VIEW
April 18 – 16, 2025
May 8 – 17, 2025

OPENING RECEPTIONS
Friday, April 18, 5 – 7 pm
Thursday, May 8, 5 – 7 pm

Jordan Hanid Awan

www.jordanawan.com
@jordan_awan

Jordan Hanid Awan is an artist based in Salem, Massachusetts. He received his BFA in Communications Design from Pratt Institute in 2007 and his MFA from Maine College of Art & Design in 2025. His work has been shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, Maine; the Menino Arts Center in Hyde Park, Massachusetts; the Museum of American Illustration in New York, New York; and Cooler Gallery in Brooklyn, New York. He has received awards from the Art Directors Club, the Society of Illustrators, and the Society of Publication Designers. Awan is a professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, Massachusetts. He previously taught at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Awan’s illustration clients include A24, TED, and the Glenstone Museum. He has worked as an Art Director for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and MIT Technology Review.

Jordan Hanid Awan is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, drawing, and painting. His subjects include overlooked everyday objects and imagery like novelty jokes and fetish items. Awan’s work mistranslates the recognizable into strange new things with unknown meanings. In his sculptures, Awan uses nontraditional materials such as hand-crocheted rubber cord, compressed homegrown marijuana, or his own hair. His thoughtful and meticulous process is informed by occult traditions and bodily experience. Conjuring a multiplicity of cultural, art historical, and philosophical associations, Awan’s work disconnects objects and symbols from their socially established roles in surprising and funny ways.



The MFA Thesis Exhibitions for the Class of 2025 incorporate a range of making practices unified by the overwhelming concerns these students have for their environment, their communities, their families, and their own wellbeing. With an emphasis on the personal, and at times the anecdotal, these 17 artists make a variety of contributions in the form of ceramics, drawings, paintings, photographs, poems, prints, sculptures, sound and video installations, and textiles. The nature of their work and research demonstrates the caliber and cultural relevance of Maine College of Art & Design’s Masters in Fine Arts in Studio Art program.