About

Jennifer S. Musawwir – Founder of FAMILY ART TRAVEL

FAMILY

We are a family of four living in New York City. My husband is a physical therapist and I work with him to manage his private practice in the heart of Manhattan. We met about twenty years ago while we were both in graduate school, were married a few years later and moved to Queens, the best place to raise our son and daughter. I encouraged my husband to focus primarily on developing his creativity and individuality as a healthcare practitioner with the understanding that I would essentially run the business from behind the scenes. This has been an agreeable arrangement allowing me to work from home where I can simultaneously manage the business, raise our children and carve out time to plan our epic vacation but to also write about art and travel.

ART

I majored in Art History as an undergraduate student at Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey in the late 1990s. After college, I worked at The Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey and eventually earned a MA in Art History at Hunter College, The City University of New York. My interest in contemporary art led to a Master’s thesis that examined the discourse that had developed around the Pakistani-American artist Shazia Sikander and Egyptian-American artist Ghada Amer. My studies continued at the Graduate Center, The City University of New York, where I completed the coursework for a PhD in Art History. I eventually narrowed my focus on the feminist art movement of the 1970s, and near the end of my coursework embarked on an independent study of feminist art journals from that era.  My preliminary survey of this topic was published in the January 2010 issue of the feminist art journal n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal (volume 25, Jan 2010, Pleasure).

While I was in graduate school, I also worked as the assistant to a private art dealer in Manhattan, curated group exhibitions for an independent art space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and was a member of the feminist art collective Art364B. In 2014 and under the direction of Diane Upright Fine Arts, LLC, The Estate of Morris Louis Estate and The Morris Louis Art Trust, I completed the project of updating and preparing the Morris Louis catalogue raisonné for MorrisLouis.org, which is currently overseen by the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). In addition to this blog, I am a contributor to Daily Art Magazine.

TRAVEL

When I was a college student with limited funds I came across budget travel expert Bruce Northam and his book The Frugal Globetrotter. This guide for off-the-beaten-path travel helped me to break out of my comfort zone when I was young and eager to discover new places and experiences.

Upon graduation, and in 1998, I traveled across the country with the very affordable Green Tortoise Adventure Travel bus tour company. It was the perfect hippy, no-frills, adventure-filled experience driving, camping, cooking, hiking, connecting with the great outdoors and more from New York to San Francisco passing through the northern states and then back east through the South. About a year later, I took a solo trip to Mexico City where I spent a week wandering around Mexico City’s neighborhoods rich with art, culture and so much history; visiting museums and seeing the monumental works of the great muralists; walking through the home of Frida Kahlo; climbing the pyramids of Teotihuacán outside of Mexico City; and sitting in a square listening to live Mariachi music.

While still in my early twenties, I had the foresight to take advantage of my youth and freedom. I was obsessed with Japanese art and I was determined to spend a year in Japan, which I did in September 2000 to teach English in Saitama Prefecture just outside of Tokyo. It was the time of my life and I took this opportunity to fall in love with Japanese cuisine, to travel around Japan and of course see plenty of art. I returned to the U.S. in October 2001 ready to lay down some roots and was determined to do so in New York City.

Everything fell into place a few years later and before I knew it, I was traveling around the world with my family. Dreams do come true…