"Samina" by Anna Mia Davidson

Four CityArtist Grant award recipients and their new work will be featured at ARTS at King Street Station May through July 2025. Read more about the first of these exhibitions, American Muslim, below!

The CityArtist Grant supports Seattle-based individual artists/curators in the research, development, and presentation of creative work. By sustaining individuals who are at the core of the cultural sector, we ensure that creative careers and work can develop and adapt over time, which is critical to artists’ professional growth and business insight.

American Muslim

by Anna Mia Davidson

On view May 1 – July 19

American Muslim is a portrait project about Millennial and Gen Z American Muslim women shot through a positive lens to facilitate a deeper understanding of a community underrepresented and often left out of the artistic foreground. The photographs intend to raise awareness, change the narrative, build cross cultural bridges, and foster peaceful coexistence—a universal issue across the globe. Through positive images and interview text pairings, the portraits cultivate a deeper perspective on American Muslims.

In their own words, each of the participating women photographed states how she would like to be seen in pursuing her passions, like kickboxing, farming, neuroscience, music, and skateboarding. In this collection of portraits, image and text converge to offer critical visibility to young American Muslim women.

About the Artist:

Anna Mia Davidson’s work addresses pressing environmental and social justice issues. Trained in photography by her photographer father, in the darkroom of her childhood apartment in NYC, she uses the medium as a tool for social change. Deeply influenced by the world around her, Davidson believes in the power of images to inspire, challenge, and transform perceptions. As a Jewish female artist, she feels a moral responsibility to amplify marginalized voices and foster cross cultural understanding. By building strong relationships within the communities she documents, her work challenges narratives and increases representation for those often excluded from the artistic foreground.

Davidson has two published books, Cuba Black and White (Steidl) and Human-Nature: Sustainable Farming in the Pacific Northwest (Minor Matters), and has exhibited at institutions such as Mucem Museum (Marseille), Leica Gallery (LA), and Howard Greenberg Gallery (NYC), with public art installations worldwide. Her work has been commissioned by Aperture, USA Television Network, FotoDocument, and has received numerous accolades, including receiving two International Photography Awards (IPA) and the British Journal of Photography Portrait of Humanity People’s Choice Award. Davidson’s work is held in the permanent collections of Zoelner Art Center and City of Seattle. She was selected as the 2016 Arts Envoy under the Obama Administration.

ARTS at King Street Station is open Wed. – Sat. 11 a.m. – 5 p.m. and until 8 p.m. on First Thursdays. Admission is free. The gallery is located at 303 S. Jackson St., Top Floor, Seattle, WA 98104.