Doctor pays tribute to mother with gallery exhibit
CALEXICO — A career retrospective of artist Martha Carr Fareed has been curated from the personal collection of her son and Brawley physician Dr. George Fareed and will be shown next week here.
Dr. Fareed, who was inspired to show his mother’s works after uncovering a trove of early sketches by his mother and encouragement from friends, will help host a reception in his mother’s honor from 4 to 7 p.m. Nov. 7 at the Carmen Durazo Cultural Arts Center in Calexico. The exhibit will run Nov. 5-8 in the gallery space.
Some 70 pieces from Dr. Fareed’s collection will be on display and will range in scope from her early drawings, sketches and still life paintings, through her evolution into abstract expressionism.
Martha Fareed was a prolific artist who painted all over the world. Works to be displayed in Calexico range from 1945 to 1984, when she died at the age of 65.
“She loved creativity and all manners of art — painting, sketching, welding, carving, woodworking, photography and photographic darkroom techniques,” Dr. Fareed said. “She mixed her own paints, loved to incorporate all sorts of media, sand, gravel, anything into her paints to sculpt added dimension to her canvases.
“She was an extraordinary artist, truly unique, gifted, modest and a talent for the ages,” Dr. Fareed continued.
By showing her works, the doctor hopes to inspire others — especially local art students — to be daring and adventurous in their own works, and to show how one can evolve in style over a lifetime.
Martha Carr Fareed was born Dec. 12, 1919, in Lake Forest, Ill. At an early age, she and her sister would move with their mother to the south of France, where she would study art there and in Italy. She would return to the United States and study painting at the Art Institute of Chicago and University of California, Los Angeles.
In Chicago in 1942, she would meet and later marry internist and early sports medicine specialist Dr. Omar John Fareed. The pairing of the two was significant, for he would travel the world in medical missions, and Martha would often document those travels through her art while teaching children of foreign countries how to paint and draw.
Dr. George Fareed said that in the 1950s, in Lamberene, Africa, at the hospital of Dr. Albert Schweitzer (1953 Nobel Peace Prize winner), Martha Fareed taught art to children in the leper colony.
“While my father developed the infectious disease programs in the clinics, my mother’s sketches of patients, medical and nursing personnel in the course of daily life, and Dr. Schweitzer at his desk and in the hospital, poignantly brought it all to life on canvas,” Dr. Fareed said.
Later, during the Tibetan crisis in 1962, Martha and her husband developed a friendship with the young Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet and ended up in the United States. (“When I was a child he was walking in our living room of all things,” Dr. Fareed said of the Dalai Lama.) Though that friendship, the Fareeds were entrusted with the Dalai Lama’s artworks to keep them safe and away from the Chinese government, Dr. Fareed said.
Throughout her life, Martha Carr Fareed, traveled the world with her family in tow, “sharing her knowledge of art and history, all the while sketching the people, scenery and the world about us in her ever-present notebooks. Truly a Renaissance woman, she painted or sculpted in her studio each day,” wrote her daughter, Shireen Fareed Pasarell.
Dr. Fareed has been a part of the Imperial Valley community since 1991. In addition to his long-time practice, in 1992 he established the first AIDS clinic with Clinicas De Salud Del Pueblo. A year ago, Pioneers Memorial Healthcare District acquired his practice and made him medical director of Pioneers Health Clinic in Brawley.
Dr. Fareed said he relished at the chance to show his mother’s work publically and “to have a tribute to her and make people aware of her talent and do something for the Valley, too, that I thought would be beneficial and contribute to the culture … What better place than Calexico, and the De Azna Hotel?”