Rachid Bouhamidi

Artist Rachid Bouhamidi was born in Palm Springs in 1981 and raised in Southern California to a French mother and a Moroccan father. He started drawing about the time he first learned to pick up a pencil and took to the idea of being a serious artist when he was 14 after seeing an exhibition of etchings by Francisco Goya in Pomona, California. He received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006 and his MFA from Boston University in 2010. The formal and figurative concerns in Bouhamidi’s work draw inspiration from his mixed cultural identity, from observations of the natural world and from popular art forms such as comics and by the working class culture of the Hispanic neighborhoods of Los Angeles. In Morocco he is represented by Galerie Tindouf in Marrakech, which shows a number of major Moroccan artists, among them Laila Essaydi and Tahar Ben Jelloun. See more of his drawings and other work on Instagram.