This Dallas Artist Turns Sacred Texts Into Contemporary Art
Ruby Jaffrey has found a thriving market for what she calls her modern Islamic art.
By
Samar Warsi
Published in
D Magazine
May
2021
Photography by Philip Cherian Alex
When British-born Ruby Jaffrey couldn’t find the right contemporary art for her home in Dallas, she bought a 3-by-3-foot canvas and painted it a deep red, adding a textured gold orb in the center encircled by a repetition of the word “Allah” in black script. Someone later referred to it as calligraphy, although it didn’t fit any traditional scripts. It had evolved from a combination of many of them. Fourteen years later, Jaffrey is averaging three custom commissions a month, and her work has been exhibited in London, Karachi, Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, Austin, and Washington, D.C.