Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Ceramic sculpture and installation
Website: maryamyousif.com
Maryam Yousif was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1985. Her family emigrated to Windsor, Ontario, Canada when she was ten, and she grew up surrounded by art through her mother, who was a painter. She did not discover ceramics until graduate school, when a single class at the San Francisco Art Institute changed the direction of her practice entirely. She received her BA from the University of Windsor in 2008 and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2017, and has lived and worked in San Francisco ever since.
Her work bridges two worlds: the ancient ceramic traditions of Mesopotamia and the irreverent, expressive legacy of Bay Area Funk ceramics. A trip to the British Museum in 2017 — where she encountered Assyrian bas-reliefs and carved stone vessels in person for the first time — proved to be a turning point. Since then, her practice has deepened into an ongoing excavation of Mesopotamian mythology, Iraqi modernism, and her own family's cultural memory.
Yousif works primarily in clay, building sculptures and installations that collapse time between ancient Iraq and the contemporary world. Her recurring forms include female figurines, handled stone bags, and vessel-based objects decorated with palm trees, eyes, stars, and other symbols drawn from both Assyrian antiquity and mid-century Iraqi modernism. She has described her approach as "drawing with clay" — her surfaces carry the expressive linearity of painting rather than the polished finish of traditional ceramics.
Her Habibti series (Arabic for "my darling") features female figures in elaborate dresses inspired simultaneously by ancient Sumerian votive statues and contemporary fashion. The tension between the sacred and the everyday, the ancient and the pop-cultural, is central to her visual language.
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