Artist Aisha Harrison speaks about what it has been like to transition to creating works from clay to bronze—the connection/meaning to nature as an artist and the power of place for her public artwork. Facilitated by BIMA Associate Curator, Amy Sawyer.

About Aisha Harrison

Aisha Harrison has roots in Olympia, WA going back four generations. She studied abroad in Spain during high school, prompting her to be a Spanish major as an undergraduate. She loved studying Latin American literature because of the ways in which the Indigenous people used Spanish stories and images, subverting them and intertwining them with their own to ensure that Indigenous peoples, images and stories survived. These camouflaged acts of resistance reminded her of ways that she navigates being of African American and European American mixed heritage in predominantly European American spaces. Her work today, as both an artist and arts educator, attempts to navigate the spaces between, centering through making things with your hands to create personal symbolic imagery, and to encourage others to subvert dominant narratives by telling their stories in hidden and/or overt ways. Her work is shown nationally with recent work at Bainbridge Museum of Art, in the Store Front Windows Project in downtown Olympia (as a collaborator in the Black Well Red Thread Collective), and at the Leonor R. Fuller Gallery at South Sound Community College. She has done residencies at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Women’s Studio Workshop, and Baltimore Clayworks. She has taught workshops/courses/programs at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Penland School of Crafts, The Evergreen State College, Bykota Senior Center, Baltimore Clayworks, University of Nebraska- Lincoln, and the Lux Center for the Arts.