Naza McFarren, known professionally as Naza, is one of the latest artists chosen to have her exhibition displayed in the Terminal 2 Art Gallery at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport (FLL) through December 2025.
The FLL airport, in partnership with the Broward Cultural Division, put out a Call to Artists in 2021 to create a four-year art installation series with exhibitions rotating every six months “to allow passengers to experience the cultural richness of the community while promoting local artists by sharing their work with hundreds of thousands of passengers,” said Mark Gale, FLL CEO/Director of Aviation.
“The wide variety of themes and formats of the Terminal 2 Art Gallery’s rotating exhibitions enhances the environment of our airport and connects passengers with the amazing work of so many different local artists,” he said.
The newest exhibition, “The Feelings of Living Things,” was created by the Brazilian American artist. As the eighth artist chosen out of 83 applicants to be featured in the rotating art series, she was selected for her expertise in creating abstract realism paintings, which blend realistic imagery with abstract elements.
“The Feelings of Living Things” will be the last exhibition in the four-year installation series. However, a new Call to Artists was made public on May 15, asking new artists to apply for an opportunity to have their art exhibited in the next four-year installation series. The new artists have yet to be selected.
Long before Naza developed her artistic style, she was a young girl living in the Northeastern region of Brazil who would spend hours drawing portraits of all kinds of people while working at her father’s pharmacy, she said.
“It was so obvious that I had talent at a young age because I used to draw people’s profiles while I was supposed to be helping my father. He was partially blind, but he could type, so I would help him by reading the names of his patients for him to record their information on his typewriter.”
By the time she was eight, Naza would borrow her father’s typing paper and her older sister’s paints and brushes to recreate portraits of famous people from magazine cover photos like Nelson Rockefeller and Jacqueline Kennedy. Yet, when she pursued expanding her art education as a teenager, she was frustrated by how constricting art could feel when trying to look at it through someone else’s lens, she said.
“When I first decided to pursue art, I tried to take courses to learn. But the teachers were teaching you how to paint like them. Everything was so technical and didn’t allow anyone to develop their own style. I wanted to find my own language. So, I stopped reading about art and even looking at art because I didn’t want to be influenced,” says Naza.
Instead, she was determined to keep practicing and learning on her own. But it wasn’t until she was 17 that she decided to pursue art as a career because it would afford her the chance to travel throughout Brazil.
“I had a boyfriend who was a soccer coach, and he had to move a lot around the whole country. So, I realized the only way I could follow him was if I had a career that I could take on the road, and I knew I had a talent for art. So, I took a vacation from my job in business administration, bought art supplies, and left with him to Brasília. Eventually, I called into my job and told them I was an artist now, and from then on, I never stopped.”
From there, she went on to develop her abstract realism style, demonstrated in her oil paintings, while finally getting to showcase her art in exhibitions in multiple cities throughout Brazil, including Fortaleza, Recife, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. However, in 1982, her artistic career was briefly put on hold when she met an exchange officer from the U.S. Army, whom she married. With him, she moved to the United States.
Over the next 40 years, she went on to have her art featured in numerous exhibitions in galleries and museums in South, Central, and North America, as well as in Europe. Some of her work has even been part of collections acquired by former U.S. President Barack Obama, former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, the Ayrton Senna Institute in São Paulo, Brazil, and the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York.
Yet, her newest exhibition in the Terminal 2 Art Gallery is unique in that it combines a series of oil paintings and pieces made using her newest art medium – digital art rendering – through which she aims to highlight the emotional connection between both humans and animals, many of which are endangered species. But it’s her abstract realism painting style that evokes a deeper level of connection to the subjects in each of her paintings that sets her apart.
“What makes my paintings unique is that I have developed a style that allows me to create this illusion of dimension without adding any sort of texture to the canvas other than paint. By doing this, it is no longer a subject against a background. Instead, I have created an environment in which the subject is melding with the background and foreground to create this three-dimensional illusion of depth,” said Naza.
Even though Naza has spent decades developing her abstract style of painting with oils, she saw an opportunity to expand her creative abilities after learning that she could also achieve this style using digital art software.
“I started to learn Photoshop on my own and played around with the different types of brushes. After a lot of trial and error, I became obsessed with it. It was exciting for me, creatively, to be able to recreate the same texture and illusions in my oil paintings digitally,” she said.
Naza is still creating many of her paintings using oil on canvas, but has enjoyed the creative freedom that painting digitally has offered her, especially with this new exhibition, she said.
“Something special about this exhibition, and part of why I enjoyed creating this collection of works, is that it includes both digital art pieces and oil paintings. With each painting, I focused on the same element, which was to capture the emotions of living things. But the fun part for the viewer is trying to see if they can tell which pieces are digital and which ones are not. I think that adds an extra layer to my style of creating illusions in my work.”
IF YOU GO
WHAT: “The Feelings of Living Things” by Naza
WHERE: Terminal 2, Concourse D, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, 100 Terminal Dr., Fort Lauderdale
WHEN: Through December 2025
COST: Free (only accessible to Terminal 2 passengers with a valid boarding pass to go beyond the security checkpoint area)
INFORMATION: www.broward.org
