Home Artist Programs Supported Artists Sahar Khoury

Sahar Khoury

Oakland, California

Untitled (radio clock tower with accessories) is a tall, colorful mixed-media sculpture. The base are dark metal frames, from one hangs a large white bell and string of oversized beads, and from the other two animal cages with stereos inside. Tacked about the frame in the center are interlocking plastic squares from children's playhouses in purple, yellow and teal, from which strings of beads and sporadic sculptural text hangs, reading ”It was a citadel of my imagination”. It stands in a bright gallery room with large windows and a high ceiling.

Untitled (radio clock tower with accessories)

2023

Untitled (Orientalism charm with TV tray) is a mixed media assemblage structure. At the base, sculptural words read “ORIENTALISM, in front of a white steel disc, and blue security bars. On top, a TV tray teeters, upon which rests a white sculptural rubble of tangled ceramic, concrete, and wire.

Untitled (Orientalism charm with TV tray)

2020 - 2022

Untitled (shawarma topiary) is a mixed media sculpture, resembling a vertical rotisserie with a cone-shaped meat stack on a rotating mechanical spit on top of a textured, teal base with multiple brown leather straps.

Untitled (shawarma topiary)

2019

Untitled (15 Esthers in a pyramid) is a sculpture of 15 white poodles made of mottled clay stacked in a cheerleader-like pyramid formation. They stand on a rectangular cement plinth with arranged objects above a dark reflective pool.

Untitled (15 Esthers in a pyramid)

2018

Artworks shown are selected from works submitted by the artist in their grant or residency application. All works are copyright of the artist or artist’s estate.

About Sahar Khoury

Sahar Khoury is an artist based in Oakland, CA. Khoury makes sculptures that integrate abstraction, personal and political symbols, and an intuitive sensitivity to site. Found or rejected objects that are immediate, abundant, and recurring, serve as a script for her interdependent constructions made of metal, ceramic, cement, and papier-mâché. Trained in anthropology, she worked for years on community-based research projects concerning structural vulnerability within Latinx migrant labor communities. Khoury developed her art practice within the Bay Area’s queer community of the late 1990s and 2000s. She received her BA in Anthropology from UC Santa Cruz in 1996 and her MFA From UC Berkeley in 2013. Khoury’s work has been exhibited at Wexner Center for the Arts, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, SFMOMA, YBCA, Oakland Museum of California, the Wattis Institute, UC Berkeley Art Museum, Rebecca Camacho (SF), and CANADA (NY).

Program Participation

Joan Mitchell Fellowship, 2025

Website / Social Links

“ I view art through an anthropological lens, drawing on positionality, symbols, power dynamics, and everyday patterns. Human figures are absent in my work, but their social and political relationships, their cultural residue, are at the heart of my practice.”