With ‘Firmament,’ Nicki Green Constructs Porous Spaces for Transformation

Update: On Nov. 13, the Contemporary Jewish Museum announced it will be closing for at least one year, starting Dec. 15, 2024. Admission will be free until then.

A poem by Eli Andrew Ramer wraps around the walls of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in rusty red text. “Let there be a space within the water and let it separate water and water,” it reads, referencing the creation of the firmament in the Book of Genesis, the division of heaven and earth. That firmament is a boundary line, but it is also a place — an in-between, in-process place that provides an expansive conceptual and visual framework for artist Nicki Green’s first solo museum show.

Green’s Firmament is an exhibition of ceramics, collaboration and contemplation. In the museum’s downstairs gallery, natural light spills in from Yerba Buena Lane to fill a high-ceilinged space marked by its own porous “divisions.” Ramer’s text creates one semi-horizontal line; a large-scale wooden structure forms a welcoming inner sanctum.

The sturdy framework, Green’s interpretation of the biblical mishkan, the portable tabernacle used by the Jewish people while in exile, is draped in a textile work by Ricki Dwyer, one of Green’s regular collaborators. Their shared sensibilities and dedication to craft are evident: the monumental purple-hued weaving, reminiscent of wisteria vine spread across a garden trellis, echoes the interlaced patterns on many of Green’s sculptures.

Green was a longtime Bay Area resident (who now teaches at Alfred University in New York), and those familiar with her previous work will recognize in Firmament many of the artist’s nods to Jewish ritual objects. At the center of the tent sits the mikvah-like The Porous Sea (Tub), adorned with delicate mushrooms that wax and wane in their own lunar cycle. A series of “crocks for unrecognizables” reference the different prayers said over food at different stages of fermentation. Here, Green finds a rich metaphor for queerness and transness: with the addition of salt and water, ingredients become bubbly, active, more alive than they were before.

Light wood benches, repurposed shipping crates and unglazed earthenware lend the entire exhibition a warm, accessible tranquility. It’s an ambiance that eases visitors into Green’s many lines of research, which include mycelial networks, utilitarian studio rituals, Talmudic study and alchemical symbols.

There’s plenty of wall text to more fully explicate some of these themes, including additional writing by Ramer (a queer elder and local maggid, or sacred storyteller) on a number of the object descriptions. But there’s also such a density of ornamentation on some of Green’s surfaces that the images become a language themselves.

The benefit of seeing so much of Green’s work, spanning five years, is to begin to recognize some of these symbols, and to spend time with her process of amalgamating source material into physical objects. (On the crocks, for instance, Green has left notes in pencil that appear by looking into mirrors mounted behind some of the vessels.)

Firmament also displays new methods. Unformed and Void, a long strip of crocheted white string, wraps twice around the wall facing Yerba Buena Lane, a kind of static ticker tape that renders the first five verses of the Book of Genesis in Hebrew script.

The show is anchored (and populated) by four figurative sculptures, another new development in Green’s practice. These relatively life-sized figures, the angels Michael, Raphael, Gavriel and Uriel, assume disarmingly glamorous poses in and around the tent. Michael, especially, sits with an artfully arched left foot on a tile-patterned pedestal. With a mikvah reference at their center, the figures start to look like they’re relaxing in a private watery realm.

Green isn’t interested in sleek perfection or figurative realism. Traces of her fingers and hands are visible all over the angels, shaping their features, their lumpy limbs and dark, piled-up hair. These are beings of her own making, inhabiting a world of her own making — as Ramer’s poem says, “an expanse in the midst of the waters” — that welcomes all the possibilities (and pleasures) of transformation.

‘Nicki Green: Firmament’ is on view at the Contemporary Jewish Museum through Dec. 15, 2024.