In Conversation: Maryam Yousif and Patricia Eunji Kim
Date and Time
- Thursday, Feb 27, 2025 5pm - 6:30pm
Location
Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco
345 Montgomery St
Details
Join exhibiting artist Maryam Yousif and visiting scholar Patricia Eunji Kim, PhD, for a conversation on memory, queenship, and the power of witnessing. Hear how they both connect the ancient and contemporary, highlighting women figures who are omitted from or distorted by the archive. How do we tell stories of the past? What are we making permanent?
Yousif’s solo exhibition Riverbend blends references from Mesopotamian and Assyrian antiquities to Iraqi modernist painting to Bay Area Funk ceramics, honoring storytelling as a tool to speak truth to power. As an art historian, curator, and educator, Dr. Kim’s work explores questions of gender, race, power, and memory in antiquity and in the present. Her most recent edited anthology, Queens in Antiquity and the Present, will be available to order at the event.
Moderated by LYRA Foundation Curator Meghan Smith.
Maryam Yousif was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1985, and lives and works in San Francisco CA. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2017, and her BA at the University of Windsor, Ontario in 2008. Solo and two-person exhibitions include forthcoming exhibitions at ICA San Francisco, CA (2024) and Rebecca Camacho Presents, San Francisco CA (2024); as well as past exhibitions at The Pit, Los Angeles / Palm Springs (2023, 2021); David B. Smith, Denver CO (2022); and Andrew Rafacz, Chicago IL (2021); amongst others. Yousif’s work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Manetti Shrem Museum, Davis CA (2024, forthcoming); GGLA, Los Angeles CA (2024); Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles CA (2023); Museum of Art & Design, New York NY (2023); and Massey Klein Gallery, New York NY (2023); amongst others. She is the recipient of the Fleishhacker Foundation’s Eureka Fellowship and a finalist for SFMOMA’s SECA award and the Museum of Art and Design’s Burke Prize. Yousif is represented by The Pit, Los Angeles, and Rebecca Camacho Presents, San Francisco.
Patricia Eunji Kim is an assistant professor at New York University. Her work mobilizes art historical methods to explore questions of gender, race, power, and memory in antiquity and in the present. She is author of The Art of Queenship in the Hellenistic World (Cambridge University Press, 2025), the first book-length study on the visual and material culture of royal women from the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia, spanning the fourth to second centuries BCE—a corpus of materials central to a show that she is curating at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Dr. Kim has produced several exhibitions, articles, and books on ancient and contemporary monument cultures, ecological temporalities, and contemporary receptions of antiquity. Recent publications include Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), The National Monument Audit (Monument Lab, 2021), Shaping the Past (BPB, 2024), and Queens in Antiquity and the Present: Speculative Visions and Critical Histories (Bloomsbury, 2024). Her research has been recognized with awards and fellowships from the Center for Hellenic Studies, the Archaeological Institute of America, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.