Penland School of Craft
Curated by Steven Young Lee
May 30 – July 16, 2017
This exhibition includes work by 17 artists who, while residing within one set of perceived margins or another, are working from within to expand or redefine those boundaries, ultimately shifting the lines of ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, cultural identity or material association.
Potter Sanam Emami was born in Iran and grew up in England and the US. She lives in Colorado, where she is an associate professor of art at Colorado State University. She came to pottery after studying American history—which led her to think about her own history—and her work combines influences of Persian and Islamic art with a contemporary sensibility. For Sanam, making pots, and understanding her voice within that work, is a continuing journey.
Make/Time shares conversations about craft, inspiration, and the creative process. Listen to leading makers and thinkers talk about where they came from, what they’re making, and where they’re going next. Make/Time is hosted by Stuart Kestenbaum and is a project of craftschools.us. Major funding is provided by the Windgate Charitable Foundation.
artstream nomadic gallery
March 26 – April 1, 2019
Artstream Nomadic Gallery has been putting contemporary studio pottery on the street for 18 years. Based in Carbondale, CO, Artstream is a traveling exhibition space housed in a restored 1967 Airstream trailer. Since its debut tour, “North American Dishmakers”, in 2002, Artstream has exhibited work by more than 150 national, international, and emerging ceramic artists. It has made stops in over 100 locations across the country from New York City to Los Angeles, Houston to Minneapolis. Artstream works to educated and to place contemporary studio pottery into the hands and homes of the public.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
by Edith Newhall, Posted: July 25, 2018
Cultural connections in clay
Clay artists with roots in and connections to the Middle East have come together for the exhibition “Garden (Feast) of Paradise,” hoping their art might help to build a cultural bridge between the United States and that region. The show, which fills two galleries at the Clay Studio, includes works by Sanam Emami, Anat Shiftan, Dominique Ellis, Julia Galloway, Sarah Heitmeyer, and Ibrahim Said.
Among the standouts are Emami’s floral and geometric dishes, inspired by a garden design for a mosque in Iran that has been under construction for centuries and is still not complete. Also noteworthy are Shiftan’s platters, decorated with historic Islamic calligraphy, and Said’s large sculptures, inspired by ancient Egyptian works.
Schaller Gallery
Carter, Christen, Emami
Early December 2018
Ben Carter ~ Victoria Christen ~ Sanam Emami
The work by these three marvelous potters evoke memories of the past through gestures and motifs–both intuitive and imprinted–from world travels, parents, and folk traditions. Summoning influence from the depths of aesthetic heritage to be applied and shared with our wider community around the dining table.
Lawrence Arts Center
September 28 – October 20, 2018
Artists in this group exhibition represent some of the best contemporary potters currently exploring technique, concepts, history, and innovation. The range of processes possible in the 21st century is unlike any other period in history. Building on the rich and long history of imagery on pottery from every part of the world, these artists are continuing to advance with technology and concepts. This dynamic exhibition encompasses a wide range of form and imagery that swings between functional and decorative. The Image & the Vessel – a Survey of Contemporary Pottery is part of a series of ceramic exhibitions and the biennial Ceramics Symposium taking place at the Lawrence Arts Center in the fall of 2018.
The Clay Studio, Philadelphia
Jul 21st – Sep 2nd, 2018
This exhibition highlights the cultural and aesthetic influences of Islam and the Middle East on the work of six contemporary ceramic artists. The artists Sanam Emami, Dominique Ellis, Julia Galloway, Sarah Heitmeyer, Ibrahim Said, and Anat Shiftan designed the gallery to highlight the function of the artwork as a visual metaphor for the shared culture between the U.S. and the Middle East.
Anderson Ranch Arts Center
Jun 03 – 14, 2019
Serving dishes contain and serve. These vessels hold our favorite foods and our cultural histories. In this workshop, students explore a range of historical and contemporary ideas for serving and storing: from small delicacies to nourishing main courses. These ideas — all organized around the space of the table — are the starting point for imagining the form, scale, surface and structure of pots.
3/20/2015 – 5/02/2015
Exhibition Images / Press Release (PDF)
The work of Sanam Emami, Andy Brayman, and Del Harrow explores themes of function and design, volume, containment, furniture, and the body, but always with a particular sensitivity to nuances of repetition and variation in line, form and mark.
In his essay “The Workmanship of Certainty and the Workmanship of Risk” from The Nature and Art of Workmanship, David Pye presents the relationship between making with tools and making by hand not as binary activities but as fluid continuum – a back and forth – that informs and influences the other. Pye argues for the persistence of handmade things through the innate human response to particular kinds of variation – like the subtle variation in form found in nature.
The artists in this show explore the nuance of repetition and variation in made things. While each artist works in several materials, their practices are grounded in the use of clay, the material that most directly records the mark of both tools and hands. Sometimes made directly through the manipulation of clay with the hand, each also incorporates a range of tooling and processes. While this variation is not always a direct product of the hand – sometimes emerging from a computer controlled machine, a decal, or the phenomena of a glaze – the particular sensitivity always points back to the proximity and structure of a thinking hand, revealing an architecture of touch.
Reed-Smith Gallery + Online
September 5 through September 28, 2014
The Clay Studio is pleased to present an exhibition of pottery by three contemporary masters. Matthew Metz, Linda Sikora and Sanam Emami share a love of utility and history that they balance with lush, rewarding surfaces and classic forms.
Sanam Emami is a ceramic artist and an Assistant Professor of Pottery at Colorado State University, Fort Collins. She received a BA in History from James Madison University in Virginia, and an MFA in Ceramics from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. She was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Ceramics at Alfred University, resident artist at the Archie Bray Foundation in Montana, and has lectured at the Office for the Arts at Harvard University; the Kansas City Art Institute; Arizona State University Art Museum-Ceramic Research Center, and NCECA in Louisville, Kentucky. She received a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant for Craft and her work has been in exhibitions at numerous galleries across the country including The Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston; Greenwich House Pottery, New York City; The Art-Stream Nomadic Gallery; Northern Clay Center, Minnesota.
See more at: The Clay Studio