LONDON.- For the past seventeen years, artist Umar Rashid (Frohawk Two Feathers) has documented the complex, historical and episodic saga of a fictional world superpower – the Frenglish Empire. Across portraits, maps, flags, artefacts, vignettes and drawings and other visual remnants of an imagined empire and its multiple interactions, Rashid reveals pivotal events and the ever-changing fortunes of a lively array of protagonists, both elite and quotidian, all peculiar to a highly novel parallel universe.

His iconographic work synthesises comic culture, African cosmology, Egyptology, Classical mythology, Native American ledger art, hip hop, Persian miniature, Afrofuturism, grand history paintings and Renaissance portraiture. His work challenges the legacies and linearities of imperial and colonial historiographies and their influence on the construction of modernity.

His work is on view in Made in LA 2020 at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA in partnership with The Huntington Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, USA, (2020). His first UK solo exhibition In The Court of the Crimson Queen or White Lady On A Horse took place at Tiwani Contemporary in London from October - November 2020.

His work is included in the collections of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art, Jorge Perez Collection, Brooklyn Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Progressive Collection, 21C Museum, the Nevada Museum of Art, and the Wellin Museum of Art amongst others.

The artist was born in 1976 in Chicago, Illinois, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

He earned his BA at Southern Illinois University in 2000.