10/22/2019
Nicki Green and Maria Paz presented in September 2019 at Royal Nonesuch Gallery in Oakland.
NICKI GREEN is a transdisciplinary artist working primarily in clay. Originally from New England, she completed her BFA in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2009 and her MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018. Her sculptures, ritual objects and various flat works explore topics of history preservation, conceptual ornamentation and aesthetics of otherness. Green has exhibited her work internationally, notably at the New Museum, New York; The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Rockelmann & Partner Gallery, Berlin, Germany; [ 2nd floor projects ] San Francisco. She has contributed texts to numerous publications including a recent piece in Duke University Press’ Transgender Studies Quarterly and a piece in Fermenting Feminism, Copenhagen. In 2019, Green was a finalist for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s SECA Award. She is also the recipient of a 2018 Graduate Fellowship from Headlands Center for the Arts, and of a 2019 Arts/Industry Residency from the John Michael Kohler Art Center, among other awards. Green lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.
MARIA PAZ (b. 1989, Quilpue, Chile), is a self-taught artist based in Oakland, California working primarily in ceramics and painting. Her practice draws from the analysis of material culture practiced in Archeology. By creating illustrative sculptures, Paz aims to archive global events, her path to familial healing, and her personal encounters with migration to the United States. She uses the symbolic imagery of her past and present life to reveal the fabric of her intersectional identity; an homage to the ceramic artifacts left before us.
In 2015, Paz began to work as a lab technician in the ceramics department at Fort Mason in San Francisco, CA. In 2017, Paz exhibited her work in London, Britain at Something Gallery and New Image Art in Los Angeles, CA. She has recently exhibited at The Tallest Part Of The Arch at Southern Exposure (SF) and Lavender Scented Palms at Part 2. Gallery (Oakland) and was a finalist for the 2019-2020 TOSA Studio Award.
