Oct 10 – Nov 7 🆓 Free
Ghada Amer: A New World
- Oct 10 – Nov 7
- Taplin Gallery – Arts Council of Princeton, Princeton · Directions
- Free
Ghada Amer: A New World
On View: October 10 – November 7, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 10, 3-5pm
Artist talk + seated dinner: Friday, October 9, 6-9pm (tickets sold out)
Ghada Amer: A New World, marks the artist’s conclusion of a three-year Anne Reeves Artist-in-Residence at the Arts Council of Princeton, generously supported by Timothy M. Andrews. It is both record of that residency and reflection on our relationship with Ghada Amer, which began long before the residency itself. Since 2013, I have had the privilege of working with Ghada as a teacher, facilitator, collaborator, and, increasingly, as a witness to the ways in which her ideas have evolved through clay. What began more than a decade ago as an experiment in a new material has become an extended conversation about art, desire, beauty, failure, and possibility.
The residency provided this conversation with a sustained place and time. Over three years, Ghada returned again and again to the Arts Council, testing forms, materials, gestures, and ideas. Clay was never simply a new medium for Ghada, but became a means of asking questions that had always been present throughout her practice. Through clay, those questions were allowed to take on new physical and conceptual dimensions. The works in this exhibition emerge from this process of experimentation — they are evidence of not only what Ghada physically created, but of what can happen when an artist is given the time, space, resources, and freedom to pursue an idea without knowing exactly where it will lead. This is the whole philosophical point of our residency.
A New World also represents a continuation rather than a conclusion. Ghada’s ceramic practice has developed over more than 13 years, and the works presented here demonstrate an artist who remains unwilling to settle into a fixed vocabulary — to becoming a brand. The introduction of new slab forms and vessels alongside the now-recognizable ceramic wall works reflects an ongoing restlessness. Clay continues to offer Ghada a material through which she can resist resolution, allowing gesture, image, and chance to remain in productive tension.
About Ghada Amer:
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 Biennale, 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.
Artist Website
From Arts Council of Princeton. Dates and details can change — check before you go.