Sara Ouhaddou

Sara Ouhaddou is a French-Moroccan artist whose practice draws from craft traditions, language, architecture, and material culture across North Africa. Ouhaddou creates sculptures, installations, and objects that examine systems of knowledge, cultural transmission, and the relationship between handmade practices and contemporary art. Her work often brings together traditional techniques with subtle shifts in form and meaning, creating pieces that feel both historical and distinctly present.

Our team worked with Ouhaddou, the Washington Street Historical Society, the project commissioner, and the NYC Parks Department on a two-year design-assist to make Al Qalam: Poets in the Park a reality. We guided the technical design and assisted the artist through Parks’ permanent artwork approval process, a rigorous pipeline that involved the Public Design Commission (PDC), and Community Board One. We assisted the artist in preparing the drawings and specification submissions for agency reviews, responding to markups, technical design changes and Requests For Information (RFIs). As a major subway hub also sits under the park, we also guided the client team through a separate MTA approval phase.

This permanent public artwork honours the literary and cultural history of Little Syria, home to the United States’ first Arabic-speaking community between 1880 and 1940. It features a stylised sculpture of the Arabic word Al-Qalam (The Pen), measuring approximately 18 feet long, alongside two mosaic-inlaid bench backs, representing lines of poetry penned by nine poets associated with Little Syria. The work is made from aluminium with inlaid glass mosaic throughout.

Utilising an abstract alphabet developed by the artist, the artwork combines Arabic script with Islamic geometric patterns to create a symbolic visual language. Across shimmering gold mosaic surfaces, the names and words of poets connected to the neighbourhood emerge through these forms, creating a lasting tribute to language, migration, and cultural memory.