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, 2023
ceramic

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.