Member’s Spotlight Exhibition: Elham Bayati: Where Memory Blooms

October 7 – 31

Opening Reception: Oct. 7, 2026, 6-8 pm

Free and open to all.

In Where Memory Blooms, Iranian-born, Columbus-based artist Elham Bayati explores the ways memory, cultural identity, and personal experience shape our inner landscapes. Working across painting, collage, printmaking, and drawing, Bayati creates layered, dreamlike compositions where the familiar and imagined, beauty and melancholy, and past and present coexist.

Flowers and textiles are central to Bayati’s visual language. Inspired by the patterns of her grandmother’s scarves and her mother’s dressmaking fabrics, these motifs connect her to memories of family, home, and her Iranian upbringing. In her paintings, flowers and patterns emerge, overlap, and disappear beneath layers of imagery, reflecting the shifting nature of memory: what remains vivid, what becomes fragmented, and what is transformed over time.