Surrender to Mercy: Final Works by Muhammad Z. Zaman

Opening Reception: Friday, January 16, 2026 | 6–9 PM

Why make art when you know you are going to die?

Perhaps this question does not make much sense to an artist. While gallery visitors may arrive with ready answers, much of our lives are spent in quiet denial of our own ending. Nearly all of us will experience it: lying in a bed while our bodies fail or, and maybe worse, sitting at its edge while someone we love goes, slowly or quickly. Muhammad Z. Zaman was given the questionable gift of knowing—not without hope—that his time was limited. Asked what to do with that time, his response was simple and unwavering: How could I ever not make art? Surrender to Mercy is Zaman’s answer.

Please join us for the opening of Surrender to Mercy, an exhibition of final works by Muhammad Z. Zaman, opening Friday, January 16, 2026, from 6–9 PM at Hunt Art Gallery, 403 Main Street, Buffalo, NY. The exhibition presents paintings and drawings created as Zaman faced the knowledge of his limited time, reflecting his unwavering commitment to life, beauty, and human connection. The exhibition will remain on view through March 14, 2026.

If you had spoken to Zaman a year ago, after he came to understand the shape of his remaining days, you could not help but notice the joy braided tightly with sorrow. He was living more directly with the essential: more love, more family, more meals shared, more trips taken, more art. In a moment shaped by renewed political cruelty and public fear, Zaman’s response was simple and insistent: Keep going. As if to ask, are you increasing the share of mercy in the world? Why weren’t you before?

This question sits at the heart of the exhibition. In the year leading up to his recent death on December 9, 2025, he worked with extraordinary clarity, urgency, and care—deepening both his studio practice and his vision for shared creative experience. Chemotional 2, a community-centered project series generously funded by ASI and NYSCA, served as a key source of inspiration for the exhibition. The project’s public engagement was carried out through publicly shared works and videos documenting the artistic process. This format supported the project’s goals of prioritizing creative connection and intimate access to the creative process, fostering reflection on our shared humanity through illness, grief, and hope.

Zaman’s work solidified over a decade ago around an affirmation of life. Layered compositions rooted in public engagement, Calligraffiti, tensions between language, legibility, and meaning in sprawling English, Bengali, and Arabic, inviting viewers to “read the illegible,” encouraging curiosity, mutual respect, and reflection despite the impossibility of fully understanding one another. Again and again, in moments when violence was carried out in the name of power, slaying innocents as collateral to a nation’s war against its own shadow, Zaman's work—insistent, undeniable—was to say there is beauty in the lives that we ignore, and humanity. That innate sense of the preciousness of life takes on new dimension now. 

In this body of work, Zaman followed the mark on the paper day by day, allowing color, shape, and gesture to map fear, hope, exhaustion, determination, and grace. Chemotional 2 lives within Surrender to Mercy as a legacy of that process—an affirmation of art as a communal, healing act and a reflection of Zaman’s enduring commitment to connection, mercy, and shared humanity.

The works in Surrender to Mercy were all made while Zaman knew that he was going to die. Some of these were made on good days. He relocated his studio from his longtime residence at Buffalo Arts Studio to his home, where he could paint whenever it was physically possible to do so. These paintings are evidence of will and vision. Zaman says his hand has become more assured in this time, less careful plotting of his calligraphic script, less time wasted in doubt and bullshit. Some works, Zaman’s drawings made in the waiting rooms of Roswell or in hospital beds, are the literal inscription of time lived. Taking a line for a walk, it leads you by the hand, out of fear into grace.

We would like to thank M. Delmonico Connolly for his assistance in writing this statement, following a recent intimate interview with the artist, and ASI and NYSCA for their support.