The work of the artist Uman is a study in contrasts – variations of discordant color combinations mingle with kinetic patterns and textures she creates on canvas. Some paintings beckon a prolonged gaze that is rewarded with the specter of an emerging figure or two, while others, like Zam Zam Bom Bom (2023), feel like entering a raucous, boisterous party where your eyes jump to each corner of the painting, struggling to land on just one element. Her signature orbs radiate and dance, surrounded by zigzags and sine and cosine waves. Elsewhere on the canvas, calligraphic loops defy containment, surrounding the painting’s perimeter, daring to break free.

These painterly gestures recur in recent works that portend a monumental move for the artist, who has called New York home for 20 years: She plans to relocate to the south of France next spring.

Uman is no stranger to uprooting. In the 1980s the artist’s family fled Somalia during the civil war for Mombasa, Kenya, where she lived until her early teens, when she moved to Denmark. Looking for a sense of freedom, stability, and space, Uman relocated to the US in the early 2000s, settling in New York City, where the self-taught artist began painting. When she headed upstate in 2010, she found seclusion, peace, and space to spread her creative wings. The move proved to be a fruitful one.

There, Uman was free to find her artistic voice. Early paintings reflected her new environment in the woods, where she delighted in nature, painting trees, birds, and self-portraits, with an eye trained on the ephemerality of the changing seasons. During this time she experimented with figuration and collage, opting for earth tones and a melancholic, muted palette. Her first solo show, in 2015, held at White Columns in New York City, featured enigmatic portraits and abstract, mixed-media works whose colors peek from behind shadowy apparitions and dark, murky backgrounds, almost begging to take center stage. As she continued to experiment, her passion for textiles and fashion began to weave itself into her work through vibrant colors reminiscent of the maximalist, textile-forward styles ever present in her childhood home in Kenya. ‘We love patterns,’ Uman shares during a recent Zoom call from her studio. ‘That’s the culture I come from. There’s patterns everywhere, from floor to ceiling. My mom loved to reupholster things and my grandmother crocheted, so there was always something new in the house that was vibrant and colorful.’

That first show quickly catapulted the artist onto the scene, and further solo exhibitions and numerous group shows followed. The artist currently lives in Cooperstown in central New York State, and plans to keep her studio in Albany, a 90-minute drive away, running while she’s in France; she admits the move is bittersweet. Her first institutional solo exhibition, ‘Uman: After all the things…’, which opened last month at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and is curated by Amy Smith-Stewart, hints at the artist reaching the end of an era. ‘It’s almost like I’m saying goodbye to this chapter after 20 years in New York,’ she says. ‘I’ve described my show at the Aldrich as my love letter to my life here upstate.’

In the Aldrich’s Project Space, a large-scale mural features her familiar spherical shapes, which float across the gallery walls. Melancholia in a Fall Breeze (2025) consists of circular, basketball-size patches of black paint that cascade from clerestory windows down the vaulted white walls. In the center of the space, Uman has installed a sculptural rendering of a large shepherd’s-crook streetlamp, fabricated in California from scrap metal and blown glass. The lamp is echoed in a painting hung on a wall behind the sculpture, where it throws off a halo of light composed of kaleidoscopic colors that resemble falling leaves. Both works are inspired by a streetlamp near her Albany studio. ‘After moving [to upstate New York], my career began to shift and take shape in new ways,’ the artist says. ‘The lamp has become a symbol of light, discovery, and creative awakening. The dots and snow-like forms scattered across the mural walls extend that same spirit – the rhythms of nature, motion, and flow, small living parts of me.’ During a moment of levity celebrating the installation of the sculpture, Uman removed a scarf she was wearing and tied it close to the base of the lamppost, where it has remained for the show. ‘It came from a feeling that I needed to leave a part of myself in the space,’ she says. ‘In that way, I see the lamp as a self-portrait.’

Her October 19 opening at the Aldrich was quickly followed later in the month by another: ‘I Love You After Everything’ at Nicola Vassell gallery in New York City. The shows offer personal meditations on the past while responding to current circumstances that are necessitating her move. ‘I think both shows come from a joyful place in my world and in my life,’ she says. ‘I would also say that joy is relative. I did have some hard times this year and suffered through them – in some of these works there’s some heartbreak, some pain, some losses.’

The months leading up to and through 2025 have revealed an all-too-familiar pattern of violence and repression that has made living in the United States untenable and unsafe for the artist. ‘America is changing,’ she says. ‘It’s making me feel like an immigrant again, needing to flee to another place. I originally came here to feel peace and serenity – I don’t feel either at this moment, especially this year,’ she says. The situation has undoubtedly triggered some childhood memories that Uman has worked hard to balance and counteract through the colorful, ebullient motifs in her work, yet on the flip side of this coin she subtly exercises her anger on canvas. ‘There’s a middle finger in one of the paintings in the Nicola Vassell show,’ she says, laughing. ‘Someone told me it looked like a quilt, but if you get close you’ll see a middle finger. So I have added these little things in the paintings that are my little cracks into the work.’

Uman is currently experimenting with new collaged works that feature her own photography and is working on a new series of geometric paintings for her 2026 survey show at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, curated by its artistic director, Lauren Cornell. These mosaic-like motifs are reminiscent of the tiled patchwork murals and walls found in the coastal towns of Kenya that the artist frequented in her youth. Uman is also looking forward, exploring new mediums and her soon-to-be new home in Bagnols-sur-Cèze. ‘I’m going to do the same thing I did when I moved upstate – I’ll get comfortable, reacquainted, and find my balance. Then I’ll create a studio environment that will become my bubble,’ she says. ‘I’m looking forward to being in a place where I can just let my hair down and walk and swim in the river and have a calm life.’