Imagined Vessels

Dec. 3, 2024 - Feb. 23, 2025

Ceramics by Paz G, Liz Hernández, Cathy Lu, Maria Porges, and Maryam Yousif

In Imagined Vessels, artists engage with ceramics and clay to investigate memory, history, and cultural hybridity.

These five artists meld mythology with pop culture, ancestral roots with lived experiences, and timeless technique with inventive shapes. Paz G combines a spiritual and studio practice to create sculptures infused with song and protest. Deeply influenced by Mexican craft techniques, Liz Hernández’s clay slip paintings of plates and vessels explore the rich language of materials. 

Cathy Lu’s provocative ceramic installations disrupt common conceptions of what it means to be Asian American. For her MashUps, Maria Porges applies her knowledge of the history of ceramics by creating forms that combine attributes from across cultures and time. Maryam Yousif’s sculptures use imagery from her Persian heritage to create colorful figures informed by mythology and fashion.

Using one of humanity’s oldest crafts to consider topics such as protest, identity, folklore, memory, or ancient practices, these artists redefine the vessel to remind us of the interconnectedness of human experience. 

Imagined Vessels is presented by USF’s MA in Museum Studies Curatorial Practicum class led by Professor Paula Birnbaum. Content and Research: Bridget Danner (‘24), Emali Brophy (‘25), Kelci R.L. Bengier (‘25), Kristin De Vivo (‘25); Exhibit Design: Emerson Narciso (‘25), Hannah Perez (‘25), Kris Cavin (‘25), Matthew Howley (‘25), Patricia Diaz (‘25); Visitor Experience: Anyssa Govea (‘25), Clementina Canava (‘25), Dylan Romagnola (‘24), Nicholas Guzman (‘25).

About the Artists

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Paz G

The ceramic sculptures of self-taught Chilean artist Paz G house the tales of their family’s lives and lineages, threading the connective tissue of memory across experiences of precarity and displacement. Most recently, Paz G’s work is driven by sound, merging song and form inspired by resistance music and the New Song Movement of Chile. Paz G was recently featured in Bay Area Now 9 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Personal Alchemy, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Arts; Ceramic Interventions, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, CA, and Slip Tease, Kasmin Gallery, NY, NY. They were a finalist for the 2024 SFMOMA SECA Award.

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Liz Hernández

Liz Hernández is a multidisciplinary artist whose work blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction through painting, sculpture, embroidery, and writing. Born in Mexico City, her work is deeply influenced by Mexican craft techniques and explores the rich language of materials, drawing inspiration from literature, anthropology, syncretism, and cultural traditions. Hernández has exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work is part of the permanent collections at KADIST, SFMOMA, and the de Young Museum.

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Cathy Lu

Cathy Lu offers a contemporary and personal perspective on the legacy of Chinese art objects to disrupt collective beliefs about what it means to be Asian American. Born and raised in Miami Florida by parents of Taiwanese and Chinese heritage, Lu received her BA and BFA from Tufts University and her MFA in Sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute. Lu’s ceramic sculptures and large-scale installations examine what it means to hold multiple identities. Lu’s work has been exhibited at the Berkeley Art Center, SFMOMA, Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, A-B Projects in Los Angeles, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, and Marin MOCA. Her work is in the collections of SFMOMA, KADIST, ICA Miami, and The Bunker Art Space. Lu was a 2019 Asian Cultural Council/ Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation Fellow and a 2022 SFMOMA SECA Award winner.

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Maria Porges

Maria Porges is a Bay Area artist and writer whose work has been exhibited widely in solo and group shows. Born in Oakland, Porges received a BA from Yale University and MFA from the University of Chicago. In her early assemblages, she featured text in conjunction with tools. In the decade that followed, she pursued an interest in casting and began creating objects in bronze, glass and wax. Porges returned to ceramics during the pandemic after a 35 year hiatus. Her Mashups series of vessels borrow from multiple cultural traditions. Her artwork is held in permanent collections of SFMOMA, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and Oakland Museum of California. In addition to her studio practice, Porges writes extensively for art publications and has authored over 120 essays for exhibition catalogs and numerous scripts for museum audio tours. Porges is a professor at California College of Arts in both the Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies programs. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2012 SFMOMA SECA Award and the 2024 College Art Association Distinguished Teaching of Art Award.

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Maryam Yousif

Maryam Yousif is a San Francisco-based ceramicist whose work forges connections between contemporary and ancient culture. Born in Baghdad, Iraq, she immigrated to Canada as a child. She received a BA at the University of Windsor, Ontario and a MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Inspired by themes from Mesopotamian mythology, the history of date palms, and the iconic music of Arab pop singers, Yousif creates vessels to honor her cultural heritage. Yousif has held solo exhibitions at Rebecca Camacho Presents, San Francisco, The Pit, Los Angeles, David B. Smith Gallery,  Denver, Guerrero Gallery,  San Francisco, and, most recently, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco. She has received the Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship.