Works by Ibrahim Said are held in the permanent collections of major public institutions, including the Bait al-Baranda Museum, Muscat, Oman; Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; Des Moines Art Center, IA; Kalamazoo Institute of Art, MI; Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, Germany; Museum of Modern Art, Cairo Egypt; National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, England. In 2024, Said’s work Hourglass was acquired by the Brooklyn Museum, NY; and in 2025, Reflection was acquired by the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington. D.C., and Karnak 1 at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC. The artist was awarded the 2024 Maxwell/Hanrahan Awards in Craft and, in 2025, was announced as one of three individuals selected for a new artisan residency program at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Said has mounted solo and group exhibitions at the Cary Arts Center, NC; Claymaker’s Gallery, Durham, NC; New Bedford Art Museum, MA; Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Bardo National Museum, Tunis, Tunisia; Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY; and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; among others. The artist lives and works in Greensboro, NC.
Ibrahim Said (Egyptian, b. 1976)
Ibrahim Said (b. 1976; Cairo, Egypt) creates ceramic vessels that take on gravity-defying shapes, with top-heavy bodies supported by sinuous legs and tentacles coiled into mobius strips. Cascading down their sides are intricate geometric patterns that mimic the interlacing designs of Islamic art and architecture. Each piece is made complete with a fine glaze, often in a burnished black that recalls the black-topped pottery of the ancient Egyptian Naqada period (4000 – 3000 BCE). Such historic references are hardly a coincidence: at the core of the Egyptian-American artist’s practice is a deep love and knowledge of his home country’s ceramic traditions. With his rigorous practice, Said celebrates his heritage while advancing quintessentially Egyptian motifs and forms towards new horizons.
Born into a family of potters and raised in Al Fustat, an area of Cairo famous for commercial pottery, Said’s interest in the medium emerged at six years old, when he began accompanying his father to his pottery studio. The artist’s work is influenced by the visual landscape of his childhood; walking to the studio every day, he passed buildings inlaid with relief carvings on doors and walls, which he now integrates into his vessels. The patterns are derived from jug filters characteristic to ceramicware from Egypt’s Fatimid Dynastic era (900 CE). Traditionally, these designs are painstakingly carved into interlaced shapes, animals, and flowers, these filters separate river sediment and particles out of the water, which then flows newly filtrated into the container. From the outside, the jugs appear to be completely unadorned and plain, as the filters reside inside the jugs’ necks. Only the drinker can peer into its neck and see the carved patterns. Said is intrigued by this concept of inward, private beauty, yet in his own work, he transposes it outward for all to see.