Location: Pacifica, CA
Medium: Painting, assemblage, sculpture
Website: saifazzuz.com
Saif Azzuz was born in 1987 in Pacifica, California, and continues to live and work there, on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land. He is an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe, with Libyan heritage on his father’s side, and grew up between these two cultures — surrounded both by Libyan relatives whose homes were filled with maximalist North African and Islamic art, and by the landscapes, oral traditions, and material practices of his Yurok family. He received his BFA in Painting and Drawing from the California College of the Arts in 2013.
He is a 2022 SFMOMA SECA Award finalist and has participated in the Clarion Alley Mural Project and the Facebook Artist-in-Residence program. His work is held in the permanent collections of the de Young Museum, KADIST, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Rennie Museum, UBS Art Collection, Stanford Health Care, and the University of St. Thomas. He is represented by Anthony Meier Fine Arts in Mill Valley, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York, and Lawrie Shabibi in Dubai.
Azzuz paints on large canvases using spray paint, dyes, and inks applied over native and invasive plant species laid directly on the canvas surface — incorporating the land physically into each work. His color palettes are drawn from California’s wildfire and drought maps, producing urgent yellows, oranges, and reds that function simultaneously as beauty and warning. The ghost-like imprints of plants create shapes that straddle abstraction and surrealism, vibrating with the cycles of the seasons and the deep interconnection between human and more-than-human life.
Alongside painting, Azzuz works in wood assemblage, metalwork, ceramics, and beadwork, drawing on Yurok art-making traditions while also confronting the ongoing material consequences of colonialism and settler dispossession. His titles frequently incorporate Yurok language, asserting the vitality of an ongoing living culture alongside the English text. His work is not nostalgic — it is addressed to the present crisis of land, water, and sovereignty, and insists on Indigenous resilience as a living, active force.
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