Ms. Rasheed drew inspiration from the oral histories while digging into her own family background. Hers is an interdisciplinary art that often juxtaposes scraps of academic text photocopied from books and reordered to give it new meaning. (Reviewing her work in a group show in April in The New York Times, Jillian Steinhauer wrote that the work formed “different permutations, suggesting a refreshing inquisitiveness.”)

To compile those disparate parts into something whole, Ms. Rasheed arranges shapes and text on the bed of a Xerox machine, manipulates and enlarges it digitally and prints it out on large sheets of archival inkjet paper. (She has two Xerox machines at her apartment in Crown Heights.) When she visits her parents’ home in California, she often goes through her father’s decades-old notes on the Quran and other Islamic books, taking home material that could one day fit into her art. Her father, who converted to Islam in the early 1980s, photocopied pages from the books and pasted them on white paper so he could annotate them without sullying the actual pages. Text from those notes, as well as Ms. Rasheed’s own Arabic study book from when she was a teenager, found places in “An Opening.”

Mr. Ali, the oral historian, said in an interview with a Brooklyn Historical Society curator that he and Ms. Rasheed had imagined an aural experience that was reminiscent of overhearing snippets of conversation from the surrounding tables in a cafe.

People who grew up in similar communities in one borough but who had never met had their voices overlaid, as if they were under one roof.

“We had created a community of people by forming this collection who didn’t know each other, who never said they identified with each other,” Mr. Ali said, “We did it to expand what people understood as being Muslim in Brooklyn.”

An Opening

Through June 30, Brooklyn Historical Society, 128 Pierrepont Street, Brooklyn, 718-222-4111; brooklynhistory.org.