The earrings on Maryam Yousif’s Head of Female Figure with Deportation Earrings were once a homecoming gift. Her grandfather brought them to her grandmother after returning from deportation to Iran. They are a small, beautiful part of a brutal family history. On a ceramic head drawing from ancient Nimrud, they refuse to disappear into the decoration.
Yousif told Jacqueline Huynh Young their history for American Craft. She still wears the originals. Her sculpture combines a reference to an Assyrian ivory head with that family jewellery, while a scene on the reverse recalls the Iraqi marshes her mother paints. Turning the object reveals another part of the family’s visual history.
Above Earth, Under The Rays of the Sun, her spring exhibition at The Pit in Los Angeles, took its title from a warning against disturbing the Assyrian queens’ tombs at Nimrud. Ceramic palms, vessels, birds and figures occupied a space organised around burial and belongings. The warning gives those objects a particular context: possessions intended to remain with somebody, subsequently encountered by others.
Born in Baghdad and based in San Francisco, Yousif draws from museum collections as well as family memories. The two are unusually close in Head of Female Figure with Deportation Earrings. Its sculptural reference comes from an ancient object; the jewellery can still be worn by the person who made this version.
Her glazed-stoneware Midrib is announced for Ancient Queenship: Art, Power, and Presence at the Getty Villa, February 3 to May 3, 2027. The earrings offer a good introduction before then. They connect an account of deportation to an object that has remained in everyday use, giving family history a presence beyond the museum reference. Yousif still wears them.