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Culture Couch is WYSO's occasional series exploring the arts and culture scene in our community. It’s stories about creativity – told through creative audio storytelling.

Muslim faith in clay: An artist’s response to the Gaza crisis

Sumayah Chappelle painted templates that inspired the ceramic works on canvas in the show. she is standing in a studio with a white wall holding a pen and ink drawing.
David Seitz
Sumayah Chappelle painted templates that inspired the ceramic works on canvas in the show.

Sumayah Chapelle’s journey as an artist is also a journey of her faith. Now she is sharing that faith with the village of Yellow Springs in her show at the Chrome Studio.

One day in high school, Sumayah Chappelle was called to the principal’s office. The Yellow Springs police wanted to talk to her.

“Chief Carlson was in the office,” Chappelle said. “I was like, what did I do? No, but he was like, hey, Sumaya, I’ve been instructed to redo the lobby, and I want to have a portrait of Coretta Scott King.”

This was in 2019. It was her first commission. Chappelle had gained a reputation for her portraits. She also painted portraits of seven musicians that hung behind them on a stage at a Dayton night spot.

Ceramic sculpture on canvas of leaves, flowers, and citrus slices in patterns
Photo: David Seitz
The work, "Prostration" shows the afterlife with its abundance of nature in leaves, flowers, and fruit.

She describes the portraits of the musicians as abstract realism. The faces were accurate, Chapelle remarked, but she noted, “When I would make a mistake, I would turn it into maybe a pattern of polka dots on their cheek, you know what I’m saying? So I would add, just completely distort their face with all sorts of patterns, lines, stripes.”

"So I would just completely distort their face with all sorts of patterns, lines, stripes.”


The distortions expressed the inner lives of the people she painted. She also painted many portraits of herself.

"Different versions of myself,” Chappelle recalled. “Beautified versions or maybe just real groggy, ugly versions of myself.”

Chappelle said at the time, her life also felt groggy, cluttered, messy. People liked her portraits, but she felt ill at ease, out of control. She kept a vegan diet throughout high school and after graduation ran a vegan food truck, but it was running her down.

“I was in the most unhealthy condition I had ever been, pulling all nighters, drinking Red Bulls," Chappelle said.

She said she needed a spiritual compass. Many members of her family are Muslim. Chappelle fondly remembers watching people go to Friday prayers at the mosque in Xenia. After long conversations with her father and brother, she fully embraced the Islamic faith. She studied Arabic in Jordan and last year came back to college in the U.S. for religious studies.

“I just kept having these visions of these large panels with ceramic sculptures. I wanted the experience to be as if you are walking into gardens of paradise."

As she watched the pro-Palestinian protests, she had a vision for an exhibition rooted in her faith.

Clay ceramic mosaic showing a mosque with cracks in the clay and a woman in a burqa
Photo: David Seitz
The work "The Pleading Woman" shows Sumayah Chappelle in a burqa overshadowed by a luminous mosque behind her.

“I just kept having these visions of these large panels with ceramic sculptures. I wanted the experience to be as if you are walking into gardens of paradise,” Chappelle recalled.

She had never worked with clay before, so she took a ceramics class.

“I wanted to make art that was lasting, make art that was firm, make art that was like a foundation, structure, as firm as I’ve known the faith to be,” Chapelle said.

She made digital illustrations, then projected them onto large paper, traced the projections and painted the lines in fluid black. These paintings became the templates for ceramic images of mosques, buildings and floral designs on canvases. The ceramics are unglazed and glow in the pure white of the fired clay.

Some of the ceramics broke in the kiln. For Chappelle, this was a lesson about human fragility.

“It’s just material that will break and shatter just like our bodies,” she said. “And none of this is coming with us except for what is unseen.”

She named each work with a verse from the Quran. One work is called “Morning Hours.” It suggests the afterlife for those killed in Gaza.

Ceramic sculpture on canvas showing broken walls and rubble with flowers and leaves blossoming through the cracks
Photo: David Seitz
The Work "Morning Hours" suggests the life hereafter for those who lost their lives in Gaza.

“You see the rubble, and you see the lush floral leaves and nature blossoming from the cracks,” she said. “And also the fact that all these pieces are broken and tattered but yet pieced together excellently show that there’s beauty coming out of all of this darkness.”

“You see the rubble, and you see the lush floral leaves and nature blossoming from the cracks."

In the work called “Prostration," ceramic leaves, flowers and citrus slices now cover the canvas, offering the abundance of the hereafter in the Islamic faith.

In another work, “The Pleading Woman,” Chappelle appears as a small faceless figure in a burqa overshadowed by the landscape and a mosque. Chappelle said this work shows her pursuit of knowledge in Islam.

“This piece is to symbolize, to foreshadow my future,” she said.

This is what she hopes for the town where she grew up, Yellow Springs. It’s why she called the exhibit “Renaissance.”

“The title Renaissance, I would say, is a revival, an awakening of faith, an awakening of spiritual alignment and pursuit of truth, so I would like to see that in my community," she said.

For more information on how you can view the exhibition, visit the Chrome Studio website.

The artist is the niece of comedian Dave Chappelle. WYSO will be leasing space next year for its new studios from his real estate company. The exhibit also is being held in the Yellow Springs office for Crome Architecture, which is the architect on the new studios.

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David Seitz learned his audio writing skills in the third Community Voices class. Since then he has produced many stories on music, theater, dance, and visual art for Cultural Couch. Some of these stories have won awards from the Public Media Journalists Association and the Ohio Associated Press Media Editors. He is deeply grateful that most of his stories address social justice issues in a variety of art forms, whether it be trans gender singing, the musical story of activist Bayard Rustin, or men performing Hamilton in prison.