Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Sculpture, installation
Website: sahar-khoury.com
Sahar Khoury was born in 1973 in Chicago, Illinois, and has lived and worked in Oakland, California for nearly thirty years. She received her BA in Anthropology from UC Santa Cruz in 1996, then spent over a decade working as a community-based researcher at San Francisco State University's César Chávez Institute, conducting ethnographic projects focused on structural vulnerability within Latinx migrant labor communities. She developed her art practice in parallel, finding a home in Oakland's queer arts scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s — making work for music shows, theater, and protests — before formally returning to study and receiving her MFA from UC Berkeley in 2013.
She is the recipient of the SFMOMA SECA Art Award (2019), the Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2025), and the Eureka Fellowship (2026–2029). She will be a 2026 Resident Faculty Artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Her work is held in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. She is represented by Rebecca Camacho Presents in San Francisco, CANADA in New York, and Parker Gallery in Los Angeles.
Khoury makes sculptures that integrate abstraction, personal and political symbols, and an intuitive sensitivity to site. Trained as an anthropologist, she approaches found and rejected objects — security bars, fence posts, food remnants, domestic items, pets — as carriers of social and cultural meaning, using them as molds or surfaces for reliefs that repeat and morph across bodies of work. Her constructions combine ceramic, metal, concrete, papier-mâché, resin, textiles, and wood, joined together with an ethos of multiplicity and makeshift unity that deliberately bypasses conventional material hierarchies. The result is work that is formally raw yet emotionally precise — simultaneously funny, uncanny, and politically alive.
Her practice has evolved from an early interest in queer and activist community-making into a broader engagement with grief, mourning, ancestry, and the collective weight of global events, all refracted through the intimacy of domestic objects, family histories, and her two cats, Lola and Pearl, who appear repeatedly cast in bronze.
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