Rama Duwaji is no newcomer to conversations about feminist art, diaspora, and political resistance. But her recent surge in public visibility after congratulating her husband, Zohran Mamdani, as mayor of New York City has put her work in a very different spotlight. Duwaji’s work no longer circulates only within the familiar digital economies of activist art and illustration, but is now in close proximity to formal power. Her presence in the role of First Lady raises questions that resonate far beyond New York, including feminist movements in India grappling with their own contradictions around representation, institutional capture and the aestheticization of dissent.
What does it mean when art from the margins finds its way into the villa? Can feminist practice maintain its political edge when it comes into proximity with state power, or is there a risk that visibility will be neutralized? And perhaps most critically, does visibility within institutions lead to transformation or does it simply provide a venue for inclusion?
Duwaji’s illustrations have long circulated online in an ecosystem of feminist visual culture. Characterized by thin lines, soft color palettes, and what many refer to as a “modernist” sensibility, her work often depicts intimacy, community life, domestic care, protest, and political mourning. These are not spectacular images of resistance. There are no grand revolutionary gestures here. Instead, Duwaji’s politics lie in the everyday: bodies leaning against each other, women holding space, acts of care presented as quiet radicalism. Women with coarse curls, prominent noses and defined eyebrows are heavily represented in her drawings. Her portfolio includes gentle images of femininity as well as weightier works depicting the war in Gaza and revolutionaries killed in Syria. These are in-depth examinations of how power shapes everyday life, particularly for women coping with displacement, occupation and loss.
Image Credit: Illustration by Rama Duwaji
This aesthetic of engaging with politics has become widespread across digital platforms, particularly Instagram feminist art has become one of the most visible and controversial forms of political expression over the last decade. Such platforms enable rapid dissemination, but also create a flattening effect in which political art risks becoming shared and consumable and easily detached from its material conditions.
What changes when this type of art is indirectly associated with state power? As First Lady of New York City, Duwaji occupies a symbolic position that is deeply gendered and historically conservative. The political spouse is expected to display warmth without contradiction, elegance without opinion, and presence without power. In this sense the role is not neutral. It is a place where femininity is disciplined into modesty and where silence is often confused with grace. What makes Duwaji’s position so startling is not just that she rejects this script, but that her rejection is expressed through her art and her deliberate absence from campaign events.
Unlike the wives of many candidates who took to the stage with their spouses, Duwaji often failed to appear at campaign rallies and fundraisers. When she led a previously scheduled workshop on the evening of a mayoral debate, she was celebrated online for skipping her husband’s “boring work event.” Against this background, Duwaji’s continued identification as an artist and not as a “plus-one” becomes politically significant. As she notes in a recent interview, she has consciously resisted reducing her identity to marital intimacy, insisting instead on being recognized as a working artist on her own terms.
Image Credit: Illustration by Rama Duwaji
Duwaji himself articulates the tension of the role with striking clarity. As she told The Cut in one interview“Even the word woman feels very intense. I just feel like a friend forever.” When asked if she wanted to be first lady, she paused before answering: “It’s surreal to hear that. I think there are different ways to be first lady, especially in New York. When I first heard it, it felt so formal and stuff – not that I didn’t feel like I deserved it, but it felt like I…? Now I accept it a little more and just say, ‘There are different ways to do it.’ do.’”
What distinguishes Duwaji’s practice is her sustained commitment to care as a political category. Feminist theorists have long argued that care is systematically devalued because it is feminized and associated with domesticity, emotions, and reproduction rather than domination or authority. By placing care at its center, Duwaji’s work questions the very grammar of political power. Her illustrations do not aestheticize the state; They don’t monumentalize leadership. Rather, they point to alternative forms of collectivity such as networks of intimacy, solidarity and shared vulnerability that exist despite and often in contradiction to institutional frameworks.
In this sense, their art does not become ornamental just because it circulates close to power. In contrast to jewelry, care has requirements. It insists on accountability. It’s about who is being held, who is being abandoned and who is being disposed of. As Duwaji herself expressed in an interview, speaking about Palestine and other places of ongoing violence is not optional, but integral to their practice; It would feel “wrong” to produce art divorced from these realities. This insistence on political continuity is important at a time when institutions strive to celebrate feminist presence while disciplining feminist criticism.
Image Credit: Illustration by Rama Duwaji
Duwaji’s art is deeply informed by diasporic experiences. Born to Syrian parents and raised in the United States and the Middle East, her work defies fixed national affiliation. It traces belonging through memory, language and shared precarity. Women with prominent noses, thick eyebrows and coarse curls populate her illustrations and are not simply exotic characters. They are intimate themes presented with intimacy and care.
The diaspora is often mobilized in mainstream political narratives as evidence of successful assimilation: as evidence that the state is inclusive, diverse and progressive. Duwaji’s work tacitly rejects this framing. It does not smooth over the story of displacement or Islamophobia; nor does it translate it into liberal optimism. Growing up as a Muslim in post-9/11 America shaped her political consciousness early on and made neutrality impossible (The Cut). By sustaining this diasporic memory in spaces of institutional visibility, Duwaji unsettles celebratory narratives of representation. Her art insists that belonging is not guaranteed by proximity to power and that visibility does not erase vulnerability.
Years before the media began questioning her wardrobe choices, Duwaji understood clothing as an extension of her art and politics. Her black turtlenecks and pixie cut, which Vogue dubbed fall’s new “cool girl” look, have spawned countless TikTok fan edits. But this aesthetic legibility is inextricably linked to political intent. She told The Cut: “It’s nice to analyze the clothes a little because, for example, on the night of the general election it was nice to send a message about the Palestinians by wearing a Palestinian designer, Zeid Hijazi, whose black top she paired with a skirt by New York star icon Ulla Johnson. This approach goes beyond individual garments to a curatorial sensibility about representation itself.”
Image Credit: Illustration by Rama Duwaji
For her first cover shoot as First Lady of New York, Duwaji wore a mix of young designers as well as New York-based, POC-owned and vintage brands, all on loan. She even wore ceramic hands by photographer Szilveszter Makó, directly referencing her own artistic practice. The choices reflect the same attention to heritage, politics, and community that animates her illustrations: a refusal to separate aesthetic choices from questions of who is supported, what narratives are reinforced, and what solidarities are lived. Her fashion choices contradict the feminized expectations of the political wife. In this sense, their clothing becomes another site of feminist resistance that can be visually consumed under the conditions dictated by the state or the media.
Duwaji’s work reminds us that art can be a form of witness, care, and sustained attention to lives marked by power. Whether this remains the case around institutions depends less on the artist than on the movements and communities that refuse to allow criticism to be neutralized, that demand substance over symbol, and that insist that visibility only makes sense when it opens up space for transformation rather than excludes it.
Ultimately, feminist art in spaces of power must be measured not by its proximity to institutions, but by its continued ability to make those institutions uncomfortable, to insist on questions they would rather not ask, and to maintain solidarity with those who remain outside the villa, even as some pass through its doors. She claims that her duties as First Lady are “essentially the same as those she has as a platform artist” (The Cut). The question for feminist movements is whether institutions will allow this equivalence to endure, or whether the Villa will inevitably domesticate what once circulated as resistance.
Reference list
- Nursing Ethics and Paternalism: A Beauvoirian Approach, MDPI
- In conversation with Rama Duwaji, Shado
- The Artist at Gracie Mansion, The Cut
- Rama Duwaji
Aryaa Singh is a teaching assistant and MA student at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi-NCR. Her interests lie in popular culture, cinema, art and literature. Her work aims to combine science and creative expression, often exploring themes of identity, belonging and transformation.