Maryam Yousif: Above Earth, Under The Rays of the Sun is on view at The Pit, Los Angeles
May 9 – June 17, 2026
Yousif’s third exhibition with the gallery takes its title from the inscription on a curse tablet found in the royal tombs of the Assyrian queens at Nimrud, where the phrase describes the mortal realm: the place of people who live above the earth, beneath the sun. Working from this ancient text as a point of departure, the exhibition brings together large-scale and intimate works that move between funerary artifact and living ornament, between what is carried out of a place and what endures. Maryam Yousif was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1985, where she grew up surrounded by her mother’s paintings and handmade objects, emigrating to Canada at the age of 10.Yousif works primarily in clay, producing figurative sculptures that occupy a space between ancient devotional objects and contemporary folk art. Her signature “habibti” figures (Arabic for “sweetheart” or “my love”) are modeled on Sumerian votive statues, the small stone stand-ins placed inside temples by worshippers who could not enter themselves. Her lustrous, layered glazes fuse the exuberance of Bay Area Funk ceramics with the ancient visual traditions of her homeland. Running through the work is a persistent question: what it means to leave a place, potentially forever, and what do we carry with us when we do so?
The centerpiece of her new exhibition, “Head of Female Figure with Deportation Earrings” is a monumental ceramic head, approximately 23 inches tall and modeled after an 8th-century BCE ivory female figure excavated from the Burnt Palace at Nimrud, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Like its ancient source, Yousif’s head is adorned with a richly worked diadem with her interpretation incor porating rosettes, pomegranates tendrils, and rib shaped earrings inspired by her grandmother’s that were brought back as a gift from her grandfather upon his return after being deported to Iran in the early 80s during the Iran Iraq war. The back of the head carries a boat scene from the marshes of Iraq, a landscape her mother has painted throughout her life and one that holds deep folkloric resonance in Iraqi visual culture. Flanking this central figure in the installation are a pair of tall palms, each about 33 inches high, their shafts decorated with a grid of red and black dots echoing ancient decorative patterning found on a 9th century oil lamp.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, Habibti figures in yellow, green, and tangerine are each swathed in hand-formed ceramic rosettes, their faces composed and directly above the accumulated blooms. Various objects – a teal Dallah with a cascading drip glaze, a stone-like bird vessel paired with a small pomegranate bottle, small harps, Pazuzu figures, and pomegranates in various glazes – populate the room like an inven tory of talismans.
“Above Earth, Under The Rays of the Sun” is an exhibition about the objects that travel with us and the ones we leave behind. The royal tombs at Nimrud, discovered by Iraqi archaeologists in 1988, yielded extraordinary jewelry, resplendent vessels, and a clay tablet inscribed with a curse threatening those who would disturb the queens’ rest. For Yousif, this curse text resonates beyond its archaeological context, touching on the superstitions of her Iraqi childhood and, the protective power of the evil eye that recurs throughout her work, and the deeply human impulse to surround the dead with beautiful things. To recreate these funerary objects in clay, she writes, is “to forge a new sense of life.” Personal memory and deep history fold into one another throughout.. The exhibition extends Yousif’s singular territory in contemporary American ceramics – a practice where Bay Area Funk’s irreverence and material freedom meet the visual legacy of ancient Mesopotamia, held together by the lived experience of being in diaspora.
Maryam Yousif was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1985 and lives in San Francisco, California. She received a Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2017, and received a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Windsor, Ontario in 2008. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include ICA San Francisco, CA (2024); Rebecca Camacho Presents, San Francisco, CA (2024); The Pit, Los Angeles / Palm Springs, CA (2023, 2021); David B. Smith, Denver, CO (2022); and Andrew Rafacz, Chicago, IL (2021); amongst others. Yousif’s work has been featured in exhibitions such as Making Moves: A Collection of Feminisms at Crocker Museum of Art, Sacramento, CA (2025); Rave into the Future at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA (2025); Ritual Clay: Cathy Lu, Paz G, Maryam Yousif at Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis (2024); GGLA, Los Angeles, CA (2024); Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Museum of Art & Design, New York, NY (2023); and Massey Klein Gallery, New York, NY (2023); amongst others. She was a finalist for the Museum of Art and Design’s Burke Prize (2021), and completed an AICAD fellowship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Ceramics Department (2019-2021). She received the Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship Grant in 2023. Her work can be found in the public collections of the Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY; the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; the Barjeel Art Foundation, UAE, and the Crocker Museum of Art, Sacramento, CA. She’s represented by The Pit, Los Angeles, and Rebecca Camacho, San Francisco.
Contact
info@the-pit.la
The Pit
3015 Dolores St
Los Angeles CA 90065
United States
Photography by Chris Hanke. Courtesy of the Artist and The Pit.
Captions
- Habibti in Yellow Desert Rosette Dress, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 18 x 12 x 12 in / 45.72 x 30.48 x 30.48 cm
- Habibti in Green Rosette Dress, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 14 x 11 x 10 in / 35.56 x 27.94 x 25.40 cm
- Queen’s Rosettes from Tomb II Vessel in White Pebble, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 17 x 14.5 x 5 in / 43.18 x 36.83 x 12.70 cm
- Protection Vessel Dress, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 19.75 x 13.75 x 4.75 in / 50.17 x 34.92 x 12.06 cm
- Dallah in the Shape of Bird, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 13 x 11 x 5 in / 33.02 x 27.94 x 12.70 cm
- Stone Bird Vessel and Stout Pomegranate Bottle in Tangerine, 2026, Glazed ceramic, Bird: 11.5 x 12 x 3.5 in / 29.21 x 30.48 x 8.89 cm; Orange Pomegranate: 5 x 5 x 5 in / 12.70 x 12.70 x 12.70 cm
- Mom’s Wolves Ring, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 3.25 x 9 x 9 in / 8.25 x 22.86 x 22.86 cm
- Warp Palms, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 7 x 10 x 8 in / 17.78 x 25.40 x 20.32 cm
- Catalogue Scroll, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 19 x 20 x 5 in / 48.26 x 50.80 x 12.70 cm
- Head of Female Figure with Deportation Earrings, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 23 x 25.5 x 15 in / 58.42 x 64.77 x 38.10 cm
