Negina Azimi painted her first mural as a member of ArtLords of Afghanistan in March 2017. It was Nowruz, the Persian New Year, a celebration of spring and new beginnings. The 18-year-old had just graduated from fine arts school when she picked up a paintbrush and joined other members of the artist collective on their latest project. Their canvas: one of the thousands of ugly concrete blast walls scattered across Kabul to shield schools, homes and offices from terrorist attacks.
The mural they painted captured a happier reality — the smiling faces of Zohra, Afghanistan’s first all-women orchestra. In the deeply patriarchal society, where the role of women in public life was strictly curtailed by social norms, a tribute to female musicians painted by female artists was “a bold statement,” Azimi said. “That mural made my whole year.”
Four years later, the existence of that mural and others like it drove the young artist from her homeland. Taliban forces swept into power in August 2021, toppling the Afghan government and imposing oppressive religious laws that banned images of women in public.
On the day the Taliban arrived in Kabul, Azimi was painting another public mural about land mine removal. As the streets fell eerily quiet, she ran, leaving the mural unfinished. She and her younger sister, Marwa Safa, who was also a member of ArtLords, said goodbye to their family and friends and boarded separate flights out of Kabul.
Today, the Azimi sisters live in Brattleboro, where they still make art. They are part of the diaspora of the ArtLords collective, most of whose members also fled their homeland to escape persecution by the Taliban for their provocative community murals promoting democracy, peace and human rights. The sisters are among five members who came to southern Vermont as part of the first wave of Afghan refugees in early 2022.
Since then, the Brattleboro ArtLords have made their mark on the local landscape, creating public murals in their town, in Bennington, and in schools, galleries and nonprofits around New England. They have run art therapy sessions for refugees from other countries, curated screenings of Afghan movies and taught Vermont art students how to collaborate on group projects. Recently, they completed a large painting that’s on display in the BCA Center on Burlington’s Church Street.
While the Afghan muralists forge new lives and new careers in the U.S., the art they’re creating here connects them to their past. As they have introduced themselves to their new neighbors in southern Vermont through their art, imbued in their work is a deep sense of responsibility to speak for and give hope to those they left behind.
“I came from Afghanistan, where most of my sisters are deprived of their rights. And my colleagues who are still there cannot do any art,” Azimi said. “So it’s kind of a statement that I’m still doing it.”
Born From the Streets
“ArtLords is the opposite of warlords,” Azimi said about the name of the grassroots movement that launched in Kabul in 2014. At its height, the collective had 53 employees — many of them women — as well as galleries, studios, offices and art cafés in seven Afghan provinces.
The collective was cofounded by Azimi’s mentor and fellow artist Omaid Sharifi, who was 10 when the Taliban first came to power in 1996. Because his family was poor and the Taliban closed his school, he started working at age 12, selling cookies and cigarettes on the streets of Kabul. Later, as a teen working in his father’s modest shop, he secretly listened to a radio stashed at his feet that played news stories from the BBC.
It was a horrific time in his country’s history. In a phone interview, Sharifi recounted seeing the Taliban parade his fellow Afghans through the streets, then march them into a football stadium to cut off their hands or heads for minor offenses, such as listening to music or watching TV. Body parts were left in trees beside smashed television sets and radios as warnings to not succumb to such entertainment, which the Taliban considered immoral, obscene and an affront to Islam.
“I talk about it in a very normal way, but those traumas never go away,” Sharifi said.
In October 2001, U.S. and British forces ousted the Taliban following the terrorist attacks of September 11, and a democratic government took power. As Sharifi grew up, he dreamed of reclaiming the ugly, sprawling blast walls that are ubiquitous in Kabul. To him, they symbolized the fear, isolation and imprisonment that Afghans felt after decades of war. He never intended to become an artist, he said, but he realized that painting the walls would be a way “to make things better for myself, for my family and for the people of Afghanistan.”
In 2014, the government gave Sharifi and his new art collective permission to paint murals on the walls. The artist chose his imagery carefully: Sharifi took issue with the traditional heroes of Afghanistan, who were invariably men carrying swords and rifles. He decided to change that narrative by portraying role models who were teachers, doctors, ambassadors — and women.
Though ostensibly a city beautification project, the murals became a form of social commentary that the collective describes as “artivism.”
ArtLords’ first mural addressed the corruption rampant in government: a pair of large, watchful eyes, painted opposite a ministry building, accompanied by the words, “I can see you.” The eyes became a symbol of ArtLords’ mission.
“The government was not aware … how much art can transform an idea.” Abdullah Elhan
The artivists also painted images of Taliban fighters, “but instead of guns, we put pencils and pens and ice cream in their hands,” said Abdullah Elhan, 28, another of the ArtLords who now lives in Brattleboro. In all, the Afghan collective created more than 2,200 murals in 24 provinces.
“None of the murals were painted just by the ArtLords,” Sharifi said. “All of them were painted by the people.” Sometimes as many as 100 community volunteers participated, sharing food, playing music and performing street theater, often in Taliban-controlled areas.
“There’s very much power in art,” Elhan said. “The government was not aware … how much art can transform an idea.”
The murals that promoted Western-style values — democracy, women’s rights, free speech, religious tolerance and education for all — also made the artists targets of harassment, kidnapping, arrest and torture. Between 2018 and 2021, three ArtLords were killed by improvised explosive devices. Sharifi regularly had guns pointed at him while he painted. His name, along with those of many of his friends and family members, appeared on a Taliban “kill list” circulated on social media.
ArtLords pressed on. In June 2021, Azimi was one of 12 artists who created a 13-by-8-foot painting that now hangs in United Nations headquarters in New York City. Titled “The Unseen Afghanistan,” it depicts the country’s rich cultural heritage and a vision of a brighter future: a sixth-century Buddha destroyed by the Taliban, a group of schoolchildren wearing blue UNICEF backpacks, a girl reading Islamic poetry. Embedded in the mural’s paint is soil gathered from all 34 Afghan provinces.
“When we started ArtLords, we thought, This is a good tool. This is an effective tool. And we want to use it to change attitudes and opinions and behaviors,” Sharifi said. “We did not know it would really grow this big.”
From South Asia to Southern Vermont
Azimi apologized profusely as she arrived just a few minutes late at the café in downtown Brattleboro where we met for an interview. The 25-year-old, now a caseworker for newly arrived refugees, has the kindly smile and warm, gentle nature of someone you would instantly trust to babysit your children.
When Azimi fled her homeland, she left with only a small backpack. In it, she carried a bottle of water, some snacks, the flag of Afghanistan, and a sketchbook, pen and paints. As she wrote in an artist’s statement in 2022, “I have learned that good art educates and creates empathy, and empathy leads to change.”
In addition to the Azimi sisters and Elhan, the Vermont ArtLords include Zuhra Nadem, 28, a native of Kabul, and Sean Kiziltan, 29, a U.S.-born Turkish American who joined the collective last spring after one of its Afghan members moved out of state.
“Good art educates and creates empathy, and empathy leads to change.” Negina Azimi
In all, 28 members of ArtLords and their families — more than 100 people — have been evacuated from Afghanistan since 2021. They remain scattered across the globe, from Texas to Australia.
Among them is Sharifi, who left his country when the Taliban returned to power. Today, he lives in Ashburn, Va., where he oversees the collective’s international operations, including fundraising and grant writing that provide modest financial support to his far-flung members.
For many of them, life has been a struggle. Azimi waited seven months in Albania before learning that she would be reunited with her sister in southern Vermont. They were among the 600 Afghan refugees resettled in the state since the U.S. military withdrawal in August 2021. The siblings were brought to Brattleboro by the Ethiopian Community Development Council, a national refugee resettlement agency whose offices in Brattleboro and Bennington are now staffed largely by Afghans.
Elhan also spent seven months in Albania. A painter, calligrapher and miniaturist from Panjshir province, in northeastern Afghanistan, he joined ArtLords in 2021, shortly before the Taliban returned to power. One of seven siblings, he was the only member of his family that the U.S. State Department deemed eligible to be evacuated from the country because of his work and activism. Poised and confident with strong English skills, Elhan studied computer science in college and later worked in information technology.
But art was always his first love. When Elhan learned that he qualified for a U.S. visa, he went online and searched for “top 10 artistic states.” Vermont ranked second. Elhan had never heard of the state but knew that other ArtLords had settled in Brattleboro.
He arrived in April 2022, during the pandemic. Though many of the galleries, museums and art stores were closed or had limited hours, Brattleboro’s offbeat, imaginative streak was readily apparent. The town of 12,000 is home to such creative hubs as the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, the New England Center for Circus Arts, the Vermont Center for Photography, and two different churches turned multimedia performance spaces: Epsilon Spires and the Stone Church.
“The people are very welcoming. And, of course, it’s an artistic town,” Elhan said. “They embraced us the very first day.”
What Goes Up
Among the Taliban’s first acts upon returning to power was to whitewash or deface nearly all of ArtLords’ murals and burn its offices. So it’s perhaps ironic that one of the first projects the collective carried out in Vermont was designed to be impermanent.
Because the influx of 120 Afghan refugees in spring 2022 was unprecedented for Brattleboro, Kirsten Martsi, then-manager of education and community engagement at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, reached out to the resettlement agency to offer the museum’s services, such as tours and art classes.
“They’re our town muralists now.” Kirsten Martsi
She happened to be talking at the time with Leah Smith and Michael Townsend, professional muralists in Providence, R.I. The pair cofounded Tape Art, an international arts collective that pioneered the use of painter’s tape as a medium for creating large temporary murals.
When the tape artists learned that the Afghan refugees included muralists from Kabul, “That blew us away,” Smith recalled recently. “We knew we had to work together.”
A few months later, the tape artists and the Afghan muralists met to brainstorm ideas and explore the downtown for walls that lent themselves to murals. Their “breakthrough moment,” Townsend recalled, happened back at the museum when the ArtLords shared the story of their murals being destroyed by the Taliban.
“We do temporary art for a living. We’ve probably taken down 500-plus murals over the years,” Townsend said. “That’s when it clicked for us that this was a measurable cultural loss” for their Afghan partners.
Over four days in August 2022, the tape artists and the Afghans collaborated on 17 temporary murals around the downtown. Each one incorporated images of murals that the Taliban had whitewashed, including the mural that Azimi had painted of the all-women orchestra. They called the project “Honoring Honar” — honar means “art” in the Afghan Dari language.
Though the tape art murals lasted only a few weeks, “It was really powerful. People really responded to it,” Martsi said. “We had so many people calling and emailing the museum saying, ‘Why does it have to come down? We love it!'”
That year, ArtLords was commissioned to paint its first permanent mural in Vermont: a pair of angel’s wings on a wall in Experienced Goods, a secondhand store that funds the Brattleboro Area Hospice.
Other commissions quickly followed. They painted a colorful, football field-length mural over a graffiti-covered retaining wall on Brattleboro’s High Street with designers Calvin Laituri and Daniel Chiaccio; a Banksy-style image featuring an Afghan worker on the wall of a local food shelf; and an Afghan woman, wearing a traditional cloak but no headscarf, outside the refugee resettlement office in Bennington. Other murals have been approved but not yet painted at Middlebury College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
“If someone has an idea for a public arts project, ArtLords are the first people they’ll think of,” Martsi said. “They’re our town muralists now.”
Art for the Next Generation
In March, Azimi and Elhan were invited to speak on a panel at Burlington City Arts about art and migration. Based on that conversation and the caliber of their work, Heather Ferrell, BCA’s curator and director of exhibitions, commissioned ArtLords to create a new painting as part of an exhibition called “Passages: Identity, Memory, and Transformation.” That show, highlighting artists who explore ancestral experiences or reimagine cultural traditions, includes works by four other New England and New York artists and runs until February 1.
The three-panel painting, which took the ArtLords three weeks to complete, is called “Passages of Resilience From Kabul to New Horizons.” The calligraphy in it is a verse from Rumi, the 13th-century Islamic poet and scholar born in what is now Afghanistan: “In this earth, in this soil, in this pure field, let’s sow nothing but the seeds of kindness and love.”
In one panel, a phoenix rises from the urban landscape of Kabul. The mythical creature has many meanings in Afghan culture, including as the protector of girls who brings wisdom, hope and resilience.
As the phoenix flies left, or west, over a mountain range — possibly in Afghanistan, but maybe Vermont — it follows a woman dressed in traditional Afghan garb. Her steely gaze is focused squarely on the chess pieces before her: a king, a bishop and a pawn. Afghan women historically have been the pawns of rulers and religious leaders. Yet this woman, her hair flying free and a globe in her hands, faces them undaunted.
This work, like all of ArtLords’ murals, was a collaborative effort. Once they agree on a theme, Elhan said, one person will suggest a design, another will sketch the images, and others, or the entire group, will paint the final picture. For example, the woman central to the BCA painting was proposed by ArtLords member Nadem.
“This painting … says a lot about the resilience of the Afghan women,” she said through a translator in a video produced by Burlington City Arts. “Despite the fact that there is so much going on in Afghanistan, especially against women, they are not giving up.”
For Azimi, the mountains are a reminder of one panic-stricken moment. As she was evacuated from Afghanistan, she looked out the airplane window, saw the peaks below and realized she was leaving her homeland, perhaps forever. For an instant, she said, she struggled to breathe.
The colorful, enigmatic painting seems to invite interpretation.
“I loved seeing their art. It’s intriguing,” said Merdi Mambueni, 14. In October, Mambueni was one of 12 ninth graders from Burlington High School who participated in an artist residency program with ArtLords, funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. For three days, the BHS students learned about ArtLords’ collaborative methods and design techniques. The artists taught them how to blend paints, work with brushes and make their images look more realistic.
The students then broke into three groups and created paintings of their own based on the suggested themes of women’s empowerment, self-love and the future. Those canvases, which will be displayed at the BCA Center from January 24 to February 1, will eventually hang in Burlington High School’s temporary campus in the former Macy’s.
“I think their work is so deeply meaningful and layered and champions education, which feels like such a natural fit for students,” BHS teacher Jory Hearst said of ArtLords.
It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, Hearst noted. One canvas didn’t turn out the way the group wanted, so the students painted over it. Another was colored darker than the students intended. Nevertheless, the students took pride in their work, Hearst said, and wanted to bring something back to the school that was not only attractive but conveyed a hopeful message to their fellow students.
“A lot of [art] students … don’t know what to do with their skills, to find work in their field of study,” Elhan said. ArtLords’ school residencies “can teach them this is a way [to make] a living and do something they love.”
Mambueni, who used to draw a lot when he was younger but put it aside, said working with ArtLords rekindled his interest in art. “Other people should get to experience this,” he said.
The ArtLords have done similar educational work in southern Vermont. The Brattleboro Museum hired them to participate in an art therapy series with refugees who came to Brattleboro from Congo, Syria, Yemen and Eritrea. Working with professional therapists, ArtLords ran six sessions with about 30 immigrant children and their families. Together, they made paintings that explored the theme of leaving their homelands.
Last year, ArtLords partnered with the nonprofit Epsilon Spires on two screenings of Afghan movies. The first was The Breadwinner, a 2017 animated film about an 11-year-old girl from Kabul who cuts her hair and dresses like a boy in order to support her family after her father is arrested by the Taliban. The second was Flee, a 2021 animated documentary about a gay Afghan man who escaped to Denmark as a refugee. Both screenings were followed by a traditional Afghan meal.
“It’s been wonderful to see the community embrace them and their art,” said Jamie Mohr, Epsilon Spires’ founder and executive director, about the Afghan muralists. By the end of the immersive experience, “people were exchanging numbers.”
An Unknown Future
Like many Vermont artists, the ArtLords cobble together other jobs to make ends meet. Nadem, who is still honing her English skills, is employed at Against the Grain Gourmet, a Brattleboro factory that bakes gluten- and grain-free pizzas, breads and desserts. Speaking on her behalf, her friends said she’d like to one day study diplomacy and international relations.
Azimi’s sister Marwa Safa, 22, is studying accounting. Azimi and Elhan work part time at the Ethiopian Community Development Council and the Brattleboro Museum, helping with events and installations, monitoring the collection, and working the front desk. Only Kiziltan, who grew up in the Brattleboro area, works full time as a designer and graphic artist.
“Of all the teams I have, the team in Vermont is really thriving, because … the community welcomed them,” said ArtLords cofounder Sharifi, who noted that its members elsewhere in the U.S. drive for Uber and work at Walmart. “These people [in Brattleboro] are doing art, and I’m really proud of them.”
But whether art will play a role in their future is unknown.
“Everyone will have their own journey,” Elhan said. “Definitely for me it’s art, and it will be art forever.”
Azimi has not given up on a different childhood dream.
“I wanted to go to law school and become a judge … with the power to change things in my country,” she said. Instead, based on her college entrance exam scores, the Afghan educational system randomly assigned her to art school.
She still hopes to go to law school someday, though she expressed no regrets about her artistic journey. She recalled the joy she felt in September upon visiting the United Nations and finally seeing the ArtLords mural she helped paint, the one that conveyed so much hope about her country’s future.
Her joy has been tempered by current events in Afghanistan. The day we met, news had broken that the Taliban had imposed yet another draconian edict, this one barring women from praying or reciting the Koran aloud in public.
Thus far, Vermont’s ArtLords haven’t addressed human rights in the U.S. through their murals. Though they have followed this country’s shifting political landscape for women and minorities, they declined to speak about it publicly, in part because of their vulnerability as recent immigrants. Mostly, their art reflects their newfound freedoms — and those still unrealized for their fellow Afghans back at home.
“Every day is a new law, a new restriction on women in my country,” Azimi lamented. “I’m carrying lots of responsibilities, not only for myself to just start a new life here and be free, but to be a voice for people who cannot have one.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Back to the Wall | Exiled from their homeland, Afghan muralists the ArtLords continue their “artivism” in Vermont”
This article appears in Jan 8-14, 2025.
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