Why make art when you know you are going to die? When time runs down, when you look hungrily at each hour, when you look on each day with a mix of gratitude and anger—why me? Why does my story end here?—why with that time make art?
Maybe these questions do not make much sense to an artist. Maybe the people coming into a gallery have answers at the ready, but yet so much of our time is spent ignoring the fact of our end. Almost all of us will go through the experience: lying in a bed while our bodies fail or, and maybe worse, sitting at its edge while someone we love goes, slowly or quickly. Zaman has been given the questionable gift of knowing—not without hope—that his time is limited, and he has had to ask himself the question of what to do with that time. Surrender to Mercy is Zaman’s answer.
Please join us for the exhibition of Surrender to Mercy, displaying the final works by Muhammad Zaman, opening Friday, January 16, 2026, at Hunt Art Gallery, 403 Main Street, Buffalo, NY. Conceived during the last year of the artist’s life, the exhibition presents paintings and drawings created as Zaman faced the knowledge of his limited time, reflecting his unwavering commitment to life, beauty, and human connection. The exhibition will remain on view through March 14, 2026.
If you had spoken to Zaman a year ago, after he came to understand the shape of his remaining days, you could not help but notice the joy braided tightly with sorrow. He was living more directly with the essential: more love, more family, more meals shared, more trips taken, more art. In a moment shaped by renewed political cruelty and public fear, Zaman’s response was simple and insistent: Keep going. As if to ask, are you increasing the share of mercy in the world? Why weren’t you before?
Zaman’s work solidified over a decade ago around an affirmation of life. Again and again, in moments when violence was carried out in the name of power, slaying innocents as collateral to a nation’s war against its own shadow. Zaman’s work—insistent, undeniable—was to say there is beauty in the lives that we ignore, and humanity. That innate sense of the preciousness of life takes on new dimension now.
The works in Surrender to Mercy were all made while Zaman knew that he was going to die. Some of these were made on good days. He relocated his studio from his longtime residence at Buffalo Arts Studio to his home, where he could paint whenever it was physically possible to do so. These paintings are evidence of will and vision. Zaman says his hand has become more assured in this time, less careful plotting of his calligraphic script, less time wasted in doubt and bullshit. Some works, Zaman’s drawings made in the waiting rooms of Roswell or in hospital beds, are the literal inscription of time lived. Taking a line for a walk, it leads you by the hand, out of fear into grace.
We would like to thank M. Delmonico Connolly for his assistance in writing this statement, following an intimate interview with the artist during his last months.
Surrender to Mercy honors Chemotional 2, a community-centered project Zaman conceived as a series of intimate, artist-led gatherings rather than traditional art workshops, in tandem with his final drawings and paintings, and funded through an ASI grant. Zaman envisioned small groups coming together for moments of creative connection—spaces to talk, laugh, reflect, and make art while navigating illness, grief, or other difficult life circumstances. The goal was to take experiences that feel heavy and serious and create moments of lightness, ease, and shared humanity through the creative process.
Chemotional 2 emerged directly from Zaman’s long-standing artistic practice, rooted in interaction with the public and the tension between language, legibility, and meaning. Working within the Calligraffiti movement and drawing from English, Bengali, and Arabic, Zaman’s layered compositions invite viewers to “read the illegible,” encouraging curiosity, mutual respect, and reflection despite the impossibility of fully understanding one another. In Chemotional 2, this dialogue extended beyond the gallery wall into shared space, where making art together became a form of communication and care.
As Zaman’s illness progressed, he was unable to carry out the Chemotional-2 workshops himself. The project remains an essential part of his final artistic vision, developed alongside the drawings and paintings he created during chemotherapy. In this body of work, Zaman followed the mark on the paper day by day, allowing color, shape, and gesture to map fear, hope, exhaustion, determination, and grace. Chemotional-2 lives within Surrender to Mercy as a legacy of that process—an affirmation of art as a communal, healing act and a reflection of Zaman’s enduring commitment to connection, mercy, and shared humanity.
