— LIVE PAINTING AUCTION | LOUISVILLE, KY
The Doomsday
Picture Show.
SARA NOORI X THE DOOMSDAY COLLECTIVE
Inspired by and created in collaboration with the Doomsday Collective, the series explores image, performance, persona, spectacle, and American culture.
Transforming catastrophe
into spectacle.
The Doomsday Picture Show puts paintings, masks, and staged spectacle in the same room, where the work is shown, worn, and performed.
Part mythology and creative world of MF DOOM, Walter Benjamin’s ideas surrounding Bildhaftigkeit and the vividness of images, the series moves between the theatrical, the absurd, and the catastrophic. Across the paintings, masks and alter egos, performers and audiences, consumer objects, popular imagery, and scenes of destruction become part of a shared visual language.
A mushroom cloud becomes a bouquet, a poet becomes both performer and observer, an artist's multiple personas become a form of creative possibility, and a headless figure disappears into the glow of a television.
The works consider how culture transforms catastrophe into spectacle, how consumption becomes intertwined with desire and distraction, and how identity can be constructed, performed, fragmented, and reinvented into an unsettled picture show where humor, beauty, violence, performance, and everyday life continually collide.
Sara on the series.
BEHIND THE CANVAS
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Meet Sara Noori.
Sara Noori is an artist and educator whose work has focused on identity and collaborative art-making for the past 15 years.
Sara has exhibited work in both Chicago and Louisville and was invited to co-create a site-specific mural for Amy Sherald’s Portrait of Breonna Taylor: In the Garden installation at the Speed Art Museum.
They are inspired by their work in the classroom, where they have partnered with communities such as the Backside Learning Center, and Dreams with Wings focusing on nurturing the creative spirit through material exploration, encouraging self-expression, and bolstering student confidence.
Follow Sara on Instagram
BROUGHT TO YOU BY
Operation Doomsday.
Rooted in Louisville, Kentucky, Operation Doomsday brings spoken word poetry, bilingual literature, music, archival footage, and visual art into dialogue with the work of MF DOOM.
The Doomsday Picture Show is the first art series of Doomsday: Translating Communities, a nonprofit initiative promoting interdisciplinary dialogue in the arts, social awareness, and community engagement.
Throughout 2025–2026, the project organized events supporting the Kentucky Center for African American Heritage and La Casita Center.
The series extends that mission through Sara Noori’s paintings, giving the collective’s layered language a new visual form.