MARIE-ANGE HODA ACKAD

Marie-Ange Hoda Ackad is a Canadian visual artist whose multimedia practice spans oil painting, pastel, and collage. Her work investigates the visual languages of both art history and mass culture, examining how representation shapes our understandings of identity, power, and belonging. Drawing from classical compositions and live-model studies, she reimagines historical artworks through a contemporary lens, centering figures and narratives often excluded from the canon.

In her current body of work, Ackad reinterprets Édouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia, bringing 19th-century art historical icons into dialogue with today’s visual landscape. These paintings probe the tension between the “past perfect”—the fixed, idealized narratives of art history—and the present tense, where identity, representation, and power are actively questioned and redefined. Extending this inquiry, her series It’s a New World shifts from revisiting canonical works to confronting the broader visual culture shaped by mass media—comics, advertising, and pop iconography—revealing how imagery both endures and evolves across time.

Ackad has exhibited widely in museums, nonprofit art centers, and artist-run spaces across North America, including recent shows in Chelsea, New York. Her work continues to weave together past and present, using the language of painting to explore how images resist erasure, demand reconsideration, and open possibilities for reimagined belonging.