MRAC’s Grantee Spotlight is a new series to showcase the impact of MRAC’s funding across communities.

MOHEB SOLIMAN

Disciplines: Interdisciplinary Poet

MRAC Grant Program: Arts Impact for Individuals, 2022, 2024

About This Grantee

Moheb Soliman is an interdisciplinary poet from Egypt and the Midwest who has presented language-based performance, installation, video and other work at art and public spaces in the US, Canada, and abroad with support from diverse institutions.

He has degrees from The New School for Social Research and the University of Toronto and lives in Minneapolis where he was program director for the Arab American literature and film organization Mizna before receiving a multi-year Tulsa Artist Fellowship and recently a Milkweed Editions fellowship.

His critically recognized debut poetry book HOMES was a finalist for multiple awards and dwells in the natural-cultural sprawl of the Great Lakes bioregion/borderland as it reckons, like much of his work, with issues of nature, modernity, identity, place, belonging, and sublimity.

Moheb is a 2024 Arts Impact for Individuals recipient and plans to use MRAC funding to research, prototype, and present a site-specific public art project titled ‘Poem of Sublime Proportion’ that uses poetry, land art, and social practice around the Great Lakes.

Impact Statement

“I moved to Minnesota in 2013, to work with the brilliant Arab American arts organization Mizna. I knew little of the culture of the state, but the fact that something like Mizna could be founded and flourish here, versus so many other places around the country that have larger Arab/SWANA (Southwest Asian North African) communities, told me something special was happening in the state. It may not be the raw numbers of diversity (though we’ve got some major unique communities), but in a way all the more important—because of that lack—there’s an infrastructure to ensure that diverse experiences and perspectives are elevated and broadcast.

MRAC is a vital part of that, for individuals as well as organizations, and I’m lucky to be one of those beneficiaries. As an artist, I’ve been able to have support for some unusual projects—nature/identity/empire poems about the failed U.S. Camel Corps and mysterious immigrant figure Hi Jolly (or Hadji Ali, or Philip Teadrow?), and now, a multi-site poetry/social practice/land art installation to circle the entire Great Lakes coastline. I’ve been afforded wonderful freedom to create, and define what it is exactly the likes of me can and should create.

Building a practice around the construction and deconstruction of “nature poetry” and contending with those same processes around Arab American (and, more broadly, racial) identity so intensely at play in our time has become the space of my work, as someone who happens to be from Egypt, and who’s enthralled with the non-human living world in the sprawling place I now call home. This single, singular, place I define as the Great Lakes bioregion/borderland, a sea in the middle of the continent that diverse millions live on with, daily and personally and communally across time. To what extent is there a collective identity here, based on geography and regionality, as deep as race or gender or myriad subcultures?

A Poem of Sublime Proportion seeks to nurture this sense of belonging by tying the far-flung corners of the region together through a collectively developed poem, each line from and about each location and embedded there in giant locally-sourced driftwood. It is an ambitious project that would take years to accomplish, but it has to begin somewhere. And that, through MRAC, through Minnesota communities, through mentors and collaborators and other support, will be the gorgeous regional hub of Grand Marais, where just the first piece and line will be developed and bigger plans made over the course of the year.

I’m so excited to dive into this work, and back into Great Lakes natural-cultural splendor—the subject of my debut book of poems, HOMES. Receiving support for this kind of experimental project is rare; to be trusted with it; to have colleagues and community see you and see with you; I’m really lucky to be here, in this place, at this juncture, on this page, thank you.”

– Moheb Soliman

Stay Connected

MRAC’s Grantee Spotlight is a new series to showcase the impact of MRAC’s funding across communities.

Stay connected with this month’s grantee: Moheb Soliman

Social Media
IG: @urmoheb

Upcoming events
June 17-19 2024,  “visiting hours” participatory events and talk at Grand Marais Art Colony in conjunction with A Poem of Sublime Proportion work.