Sana Musasama

Raised Earth
2025-09-05 08:00 - 2025-10-18 17:00 (America/New_York) | Eric Firestone Gallery, 40 Great Jones Street, New York, NY, 10012, United States
Raised Earth
Eric Firestone Gallery is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition of the internationally recognized ceramic artist Sana Musasama. The exhibition will be a dynamic installation of Musasama’s formative House series: vertically stacked ceramic sculptures, like abstracted small-scale temples, exploring multicultural connections to home and community. The work is inspired by the artist’s time living in adobe houses in West Africa in the mid-1970s, her recurrent travel to Cambodia, and time spent in the American West.
House Series #15, 2023ceramic
The slab-formed ceramics are multi-planar, touched and textured structures with deep color areas and repeated oval shapes that can be read variously as eyes, leaves, or vaginal forms. They are etched with intricate sgraffito marks suggesting body adornment, weavings, flora, and fauna. Elements extend from the planes: rings suggesting jewelry and grids like open baskets or seed pods. In her House series, Musasama uses both earthenware and stoneware and accomplishes her vivid colors through various ceramic glazes, often finishing her works with salt or soda firing to create exquisite surfaces that contrast with the red-brown clay she prefers.
Musasama first began her House series in the late 1970s, and they were the subject of a 1985 exhibition at the Studio Museum, following her 1983–84 residency with the museum. She decided to revisit these works 45 years later, creating what she called “siblings” to the original works in response to the isolation of 2020. Over the past two years, the artist has worked across the globe to create about twenty significant new House sculptures. This will be the first time work from the two periods are joined into a solo, survey exhibition.

Re-Union: Syd Carpenter, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Judy Moonelis, Sana Musasama, and Winnie Owens Hart
2026-01-14 08:00 - 2026-03-29 17:00 | Frances M. Maguire Art Museum, 50 Lapsley Lane, Merion, PA, 19066, United States
“Re-Union” brings together the works of Syd Carpenter, Winnie Owens Hart, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Judy Moonelis, and Sana Musasama. Each of these artists played a significant role in shaping American art–and the field of ceramics–during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Syd Carpenter’s large-scale clay and metal works investigate the complex history of African Americans and farming, from slavery to the present day. Winnie Owens Hart’s pioneering use of traditional African ceramic techniques and forms engage with contemporary issues concerning race, identity, and gender. Martha Jackson Jarvis’s monumental mixed media pieces explore African American and Native American spirituality, ecological concerns, and histories. Judy Moonelis’s intricate multimedia installations probe the intersections of art and science, drawing inspiration from neuroscience and anatomy and relating the human body to a variety of architectural contexts. Sana Musasama’s constructions of glass, organic materials, and clay are rooted in her global activist and educational endeavors in women’s/human rights.

Clay Has Memory: Generational Knowledge from Africa
2026-07-01 10:00 - 2027-07-01 17:00 | Princeton University Art Museum, 63 College Rd W, Princeton, NJ, 08540, United States
Organized by Assistant Curator of African Art, Perrin Lathrop, the exhibit “Clay Has Memory” will be on view in the new PUAM’s first floor welcome gallery from July 2026-July 2027. It will trouble the boundaries between art and craft, centering the contributions of Black artists, especially Black women, and inviting inquiry into the hierarchies that have historically relegated their creative labor to the realm of the anonymous and the undervalued. This grant will provide support for the exhibition as well as interdisciplinary opportunities and hands-on, pedagogy-driven workshops for faculty across arts and sciences.
