Seyni Awa Camara

Seyni Awa Camara creates totemic works evoking subjects ranging from bestiaries to motor vehicles and maternity scenes. Camara’s sculptures are influenced by her dreams, where she first divines her forms. After preparing her clay, sometimes adding ore or other natural media to the mixture, the artist begins to sculpt her works. Over the course of many days, sometimes weeks, Camara carves the complex forms appearing in each work. She then fires the clay on a wooden pyre before immersing it in a liquid obtained from putrefied tree pods. This final stage lends the sculptures their color and robust, textured quality.

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Now in her 80s, Seyni Awa Camara was initiated to the potential of ceramics at a young age through utilitarian pottery that was made to be sold at the market in the village of Bignona, Senegal, where she continues to live and work today. Camara's rugged totems appear to be retrieved from premonitions and dreams. Attached to a central body, animals and humans are stacked upon one another in sculptures such as Couple torse séparé base ronde (2009), which illustrates a traditional family scene.

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Nino Mier Gallery presents sculptures by Senegal-based artist Seyni Awa Camara on view from May 5 – June 10, 2023, marking the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery and first major show in the U.S.. The presentation will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring an essay by curator and writer Eva Barois de Caevel that will further situate the work within its original historical and cultural context.

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Reading Seyni Awa Camara’s practice feels very much like relating to a global tale made of many tales. Some are endemic to the place where the Senegalese artist was born; some are more globally African; some are emblematic of the countless stories Western art history needs to feed its narrative of non-Western artworks. Among these paths, maybe somewhere at the crossroads, stand Camara’s clay statuettes—the artist’s meditations on the maternal, mothering body.

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Birthed from equal parts make-believe and daily ritual, Seyni Awa Camara’s majestic humanoid clay sculptures evoke mythological deities, and are derived from her encounters with the folk gods of Senegal’s Wolof people. Born around 1945 in Bignona, Senegal, the Diola artist has been making work for the past five decades and receiving increased institutional recognition throughout Europe and Africa in the last twenty years. 

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Nino Mier Gallery, which was founded in Los Angeles in 2015 and has quickly been growing over the past seven years, will soon add a location in New York. Opening next January, the space will be inaugurated with a solo show of German artist Jana Schröder, who has been with the gallery since its earliest days. The New York location, located in SoHo, on Crosby Street between Spring and Broome streets, will be designed by Markus Dochantschi of StudioMDA and led by Margaret Zuckerman, who has been a director at the gallery since 2018.

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