Media Contact: CaitlinApplegate
Program Manager
through
6/22/2013
caitlin@clayartcenter.org
914-937-2047
x227
Social Justice Advocate and New
York Artist Sana Musasama at Clay Art Center
for Exhibition, Artist Residency
and Community Outreach Events
Clay Art Center is proud to present SANA MUSASAMA: My Journey, a solo exhibition that
combines art, social justice advocacy and community arts outreach with New York
artist and global citizen Sana Musasama. The exhibition, which features ceramic
sculpture and installation inspired from Musasama’s travels around the world,
will be on exhibit May 18 – June 22, 2013, with an opening reception on
Saturday, May 18, from 6-8pm. In
conjunction, the artist will be an artist in residence at Clay Art Center for
the duration of the exhibit and Clay Art Center has initiated a string of
community arts outreach events entitled, Inspire, Commit, Act… Admission to Clay Art Center is free.
In her twenties, when she began
traveling, Sana Musasama realized that clay existed all over the world. After
her education in the public school system in New York, she felt limited, locked
in and undereducated. Traveling became her way of relearning the world
and its inhabitants. Her work is informed by history, women studies,
culture, and her journals of being a global citizen. My Journey, an exhibition
of large scale sculpture and installation will speak of those experiences,
from the Maple Tree series about the
abolitionist movement involved with Indigenous Americans, African indentured
servants and Dutch colonialists to The
Unspeakable series, an inquiry into the nature of violence and healing in
women’s lives, to her current work, The
UnKnown/UnNamed series which focuses on honoring the lives of those
lost to war and genocide. Sana has spent the past 5 years
working and traveling in Cambodia. It is there that she found herself in
the killing fields, walking on fragments of souls that once were.
Sana Musasama's work is
grounded in the ceremonies of living, guards their integrity and memory, and
acts as a reliquary of historic events and her personal narratives.
In her inquiry into the world, she sought to understand the human
landscape. This transformed Sana and her approach to clay. There
is no dichotomy between her life and her work, as her extensive traveling has
made her relearn seeing. Her mission speaks of a global citizen who walks
through the artwork heart first.
Inspire, Commit, Act…: COMMUNITY EVENTS WITH SANA MUSASAMA
For the duration of the exhibition, Sana will be an Artist in Residence
at Clay Art Center, acting as an advocate for her work in the exhibition and
the social justice issues it invokes.
While in residence, she will also be working on a new body of work. As part of her residency at CAC, Sana will
have the opportunity to work with Latino and African American youth of
Westchester, especially young women, and be a visual presence for them,
inspiring them to commit and act on the belief that they too could be an
artist, should they want to be. She will
be working with Port Chester’s Carver Center’s
NIA group, a young women’s leadership
group, mostly made up of Latino and
African American individuals, Port Chester High School students in our “Around
the World in Clay” community
arts outreach program and teen girls from Westhab shelter of Family Coachman
Center, which is the largest homeless shelter in Westchester. In addition, Sana will lead three public
hands on workshops in June in the gallery (alongside her artwork). For more details
on these workshops visit our website
Sana will
also give a free PUBLIC LECTURE:
INSPIRE COMMIT ACT; My Journey from Harlem New York to Phnom Penh
Cambodia; Art, Travel, & Social Activism
Thursday, May 30 7 PM ; Location: One
World 163 N.Main Street Suite 203, Port Chester New York 10573
Reception and Artist Talk at Clay Art Center following the lecture.
Sana Musasama will talk about her world travel experiences and their impact on
her as a women and an artist. She will explain how the traditional
villages of Cambodia have been her home away from home and share how her
extended families, predominately women and little girls, became her
guides. Observing the lives of women and little girls, Sana noticed
radical differences in their lives and the lives of girls in our
culture. Her work is a response to what she saw and what she wants
to change.
ABOUT THE WORK IN THE EXHIBIT
About her Unknown/Unnamed series, Sana states, “My
newest ceramic work was born out of the devastation of the 9/11 attacks and the
hundreds of workers and others whose identity was buried under the
rubble, the faceless whispers out of concentration camps, the endless
mass graves throughout the world. It stems from my
global travels to Cambodia, Vietnam and Rwanda - into the homes
and hearts of the people I've encountered; these pieces represent
their silent voices, which remain unknown and unnamed.
“The earth carries the memories built
on the backs of oppressed/unrepresented people and their buried bones
throughout the world. At My Lai Vietnam, I walk on the site of a
massacre where the lives of hundreds of women and babies were taken in revenge.
I touch the soil. At the Holocaust museum, I look at the hundreds
of pairs of eye glasses, shoes, gold-capped teeth, and briefcases and I wonder
who they belonged to. In Rwanda, a young woman tells how she searched
for her family at a mass burial site. I have worked in
Cambodia with former sex slaves, wondering who enslaved them, and walked the
killing fields, with their fragments of what once were human beings.
“Will it ever stop? These new
works are meant to slow us down, make us look closely at our world, silence us
for the moment. They are created in homage to the Unknown/Unnamed.”
Additionally, work from Sana’s Unspeakable
series will be on view. About this
challenging and poignant body of work, Sana shares this story: “Twenty-five years ago, while
living in Mendeland, Sierra Leone, there was a group of young girls, ages ten
to fifteen, who would visit my hut every day. We began our rituals of
sisterhood: they combed my hair, tried on my clothing, and applied my
makeup. They taught me the formal greetings in Mende, how to sit like a
Mende woman, eat with my tongue, and to never allow food to touch my
lips. They showed me how to cook on three rocks and wash my clothes in
the river, beating on washing stones. They taught me the birth chants,
and I learned, too soon, to recognize the death song.
“Suddenly,
one morning, there were no young girls in the village. They returned
thirteen weeks later, changed. Our ritual of sisterhood was no
more. They no longer had the sparkle of wonderment in their eyes; they
weren’t carefree young girls any longer. They didn’t want to have
anything to do with me. I could not understand. I know now that
they were circumcised (incised).”
My Journey will also feature two large
scale sculptures from Sana’s Maple Tree
series. These sculptures were inspired
by the Maple Tree abolitionist movement in the late 18th century in New York
and Holland. Dutch colonist, Native Americans and free indentured African
servants joined together in protest against slave labor on sugar cane
plantations in the West Indies. They took as their symbol the maple tree - a source
of sugar without exploiting slave labor. At once, trees and aspects of the
human body, these sculptures explore links between trees and human sexuality,
between trees and human agency.
Musasama, Sana (b.1957, NYC,
lives in Queens, NY) Musasama received her BA from City College of New
York, NY (1973), her MFA from Alfred (1988), and studied at Mende Pottery,
Sierra Leone (1974-75). Feeling undereducated by her public school education,
Musasama began traveling as a way to recover identity and cultural place.
Clay was a geographic catalyst that brought her first to West Africa, venturing
later to Japan, China, and South America. She has continued her quest,
expanding her interests to tribal adornment practices in various indigenous
cultures. She is challenged by the concerns surrounding the safety of
women, specifically the rituals involving rites of passage, female chastity,
and the “purification” of the female body. She teaches at Hunter College,
NYC; the 92 Street Y, NYC; and through CASES, a program which offers an
alternative to incarceration.
Clay
Art Center is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit ceramic art organization offering
exhibitions, clay classes for adults and children,
studio spaces for clay artists and outreach programs in the community. It is located in the heart of Port Chester at
40 Beech Street, Port Chester, NY 10573.
Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 10am-4pm or by
appointment. For more information or images,
please contact Leigh Taylor Mickelson at leigh@clayartcenter.org or
914-937-2047.
###
***Slides or high resolution digital images available upon request.
--
Caitlin Applegate
Program Manager
Clay Art Center
40 Beech Street
Port Chester, NY 10573
914-937-2047 x227
caitlin@clayartcenter.org
www.clayartcenter.org
