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Sana Musasama - Artists - Eric Firestone Gallery

Sana Musasama, 1986. Photograph by Dawoud Bey.

B. QUEENS, NY, 1951

Sana Musasama is a ceramic artist whose work is informed by her global travels and her interests in women’s studies and indigenous artistic practices. Musasama began traveling as a way to recover identity and cultural place. Clay was the geographical catalyst that first brought her to West Africa where she studied pottery with the Mende people in Sierra Leone (1974–75). Later venturing to Japan, China, Cambodia, and South America, she continued her quest, expanding her interests to tribal adornment practices. She is challenged by issues concerning women’s safety, specifically rituals involving rites of passage and female chastity. Her body of work ranges from intimate ceramic objects adorned with stitching and found objects from nature, to large colorful biomorphic shapes. She also experiments with melted glass, embracing a fragility in her work which evokes the precarious existence of the female bodies she encounters in her travels and at home. 

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