Adnan Charara

Adnan Charara was born in Lebanon in 1962, was raised partly in Sierra Leone and has lived in the United States since 1982. He worked in Seattle and Boston before settling in the Detroit area; he lives in Dearborn and his studio is in Detroit's Cass Corridor. He makes paintings, prints, sculptures and assemblages of found objects, often in a comic, cartoon-like style.

His subjects are identity, ethnicity, fear, love and acceptance, drawn from growing up as an outsider in several countries, and he uses humour to make them approachable. In The Melancholic Hammer series he bends the heads and necks of hammers so that they can no longer strike. The Occupation of Memory, shown at Maya Art Space in Beirut in 2026, sets bright motifs over black-and-white, comic-book scenes in acrylic on canvas. In 2011 he bought the Astro building in Detroit, which houses his studio and a gallery.

Charara earned a BFA in architectural design from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1986 and studied city planning at Boston University. His solo exhibitions include Juxtaposed at the Arab American National Museum, Dearborn (2007), Letters Home at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Kohler (2008), and The Bubble Gum Knows at Galerie Camille, Detroit (2024). He was featured in the PBS series Arab-American Stories in 2012.