Maryam Yousif: Above Earth, Under The Rays of the Sun at The Pit, Los Angeles
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- Entry fee
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- Location
- The Pit, Los Angeles, California
- Exhibition window
- May 9, 2026 → Jun 17, 2026
About
Exhibition
Maryam Yousif: Above Earth, Under The Rays of the Sun is on view at The Pit, Los Angeles, May 9 – June 17, 2026. This is Yousif's third exhibition with the gallery. Taking its title from an inscription on a curse tablet found in the royal tombs of the Assyrian queens at Nimrud, the exhibition brings together large-scale and intimate ceramic works that move between funerary artifact and living ornament.
About the Artist
Maryam Yousif was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1985 and emigrated to Canada at age 10. She lives in San Francisco, California and received her Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2017 and Bachelor of Arts from the University of Windsor, Ontario in 2008. She works primarily in clay, producing figurative sculptures that occupy a space between ancient devotional objects and contemporary folk art.
Centerpiece Work
The focal point of the exhibition is "Head of Female Figure with Deportation Earrings," a monumental ceramic head approximately 23 inches tall modeled after an 8th-century BCE ivory female figure from the Burnt Palace at Nimrud. The head is adorned with rosettes, pomegranate tendrils, and rib-shaped earrings inspired by her grandmother's earrings brought back as a gift after her grandfather's deportation to Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. The back features a boat scene from Iraqi marshes.
Works on View
The installation includes tall palm sculptures approximately 33 inches high decorated with grids of red and black dots echoing 9th-century patterning, Habibti figures in various colors swathed in hand-formed ceramic rosettes, a teal Dallah with cascading drip glaze, stone-like bird vessels, pomegranate bottles, small harps, Pazuzu figures, and other objects serving as an inventory of talismans.
- Theme
- The exhibition draws on an inscription from a curse tablet found in the royal tombs of the Assyrian queens at Nimrud, bringing together works that move between funerary artifact and living ornament, exploring what is carried from a place and what endures.
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