ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Ghada Amer was born in Cairo (Egypt) in 1963. In 1974, her parents relocated to France where she began her artistic training ten years later at Villa Arson, Nice, France. She currently lives and works between New York and Paris and has exhibited among others at the Venice Biennale, the Sydney Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, and the Brooklyn Museum.
“I believe that all women should like their bodies and use them as tools of seduction,” Amer stated; and in her well-known erotic embroideries, she at once rejects oppressive laws set in place to govern women’s attitudes toward their bodies and repudiates first-wave feminist theory that the body must be denied to prevent victimization. By depicting explicit sexual acts with the delicacy of needle and thread, their significance assumes a tenderness that simple objectification ignores.
Ghada Amer continuously allows herself to explore the dichotomies of an uneasy world and confronts the language of hostility and finality with unsettled narratives of longing and love.
Ghada Amer’s work addresses first and foremost the ambiguous, transitory nature of the paradox that arises when searching for concrete definitions of east and west, feminine and masculine, art and craft. Through her paintings, sculptures and public garden projects, Amer takes traditional notions of cultural identity, abstraction, and religious fundamentalism and turns them on their heads.
Over the course of her career, Amer has expanded her practice into ceramics, bronze, garden installations, and public art, continuing to explore the tension between beauty and provocation. Her engagement with ceramics has deepened in recent years, including time working at Greenwich House Pottery, a historic center for ceramic arts in New York City. There, she immersed herself in the technical and communal aspects of clay, further exploring the medium’s physical demands and conceptual possibilities. Her ceramic works mark a significant evolution: shifting from the flatness of canvas to the tactile, unstable qualities of clay. In these pieces, she engages with the hierarchy between fine art and craft, using materials historically associated with domestic labor to question systems of value within the art world. The physicality of ceramics—its susceptibility to pressure, collapse, and transformation through fire—mirrors the thematic concerns that have long driven her work, including control, vulnerability, and resistance.
More recently, Amer has also spent time working and engaging with the community at the Arts Council of Princeton in Princeton. This phase reflects an ongoing collaboration with executive Director Adam Welch.
To support this podcast go to Arts Council of Princeton's donation page to make a gift or become a recurring donor.
