Homa Taj, Untitled (Andy’s Marilyn I), Inkjet and acrylic with archival paper on canvas, 24 x 36 inches, 2022

MUSEUMVIEWS was founded in 2003 by HOMA TAJ NASAB (website under construction | visit MUSEUMVIEWS @ Instagram), an artist, filmmaker & museologist. Homa is also the founder of the global advocacy project International Museum Workers Day (IMWD), established 2015.

For three decades, HOMA’s interests in the arts have spanned the worlds of theater, dance, film and visual arts.

Daughter of a self-taught painter, Homa began painting in high school in the late 1980’s. Her first brush with performance arts also came during high school, on Long Island NY, when she briefly studied with the legendary American dancer & choreographer Jacques D’Amboise, a principal dancer of the New York City Ballet.

During the 1990’s, Homa studied at the prestigious Stella Adler Conservatory (1989-1991), and worked as a production assistant on a number of independent film and theatre projects, in New York City & Boston. Later in the decade, she pursued film and video production when she made a number of short films – including Waiting For Van Gogh and an experimental animation film based on Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period masterpiece Seated Nude Back (1902).

To date, Homa has made nine experimental short films. Firmly believing in the myriad arts that comprise the art of cinema, Homa expands her cinematic practice to include mixed media, installation, video and computer arts.

Starting in 2013, Homa returned to her roots as a visual artist, on a full-time basis, making mixed media conceptual and video art with focus on cinema, as well as her experiences of living through a revolution, a war and mass migration.

Over the past few years, Homa has created a growing body of erotic nude mixed media paintings reminiscent of ancient and Renaissance Secret Chambers (or Gabinetto Segreto).

In her latest body of work (2022), Homa explores images of women and eroticism embodied by popular movie legends such as Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot and Elizabeth Taylor, among others. In these pop conceptual paintings the artist dives into the lives of the world’s most celebrated “sex symbols” primarily from the actresses’ own views of their eroticism. Homa re-image(ines) these performing artists’ active and passive engagement in constructing their public image, as well as the ways they lead their private lives, using mainly their own voices (quotes) and those most trusted and closest to them.

This new and ongoing series of paintings is accompanied by a series of multi-media works, including videos and performance pieces.

Homa holds graduate degrees in history of collecting and museology (Harvard University); 19th-20th  century fine arts and their institutional histories (The Courtauld Institute); and, histories of museums & collecting (University of Oxford). She also wrote her unpublished doctoral dissertation on the comparative history of museums in emerging markets, c 1870′s-1940′s, at the University of Oxford, UK.