Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Installation, Design
Website: slim-studio.com
Jessy Slim was born in Beirut, Lebanon. She earned a BA in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley in 2014 and went on to complete an MA in Architecture at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2021. Her early career was rooted in architectural practice, working as a designer at firms including Sutro Architects.
While at Cranbrook, protests erupted in her native Beirut, and in 2020 the city was rocked by a massive chemical explosion and a deepening economic crisis. These events reshaped her practice, pulling her from architectural drafting toward sculptural work that could hold memory and displacement more directly. She began experimenting with chickpea clay — first mixed from a 50-pound bag of chickpeas — stretching the painted material over fabric, wood, wire, and metal armatures to build landscape-like surfaces.
Slim now lives and works in Oakland, California. Her chickpea-based sculptures were included in Root Division’s Introductions 2024 showcase of emerging Bay Area artists, and in 2025 she mounted her first solo exhibition, Chickpea Landscapes, at Roll Up Project in Oakland. Her practice was profiled by the New York Times in May 2025 in a feature on how a bag of chickpeas became the material foundation of her work.
Slim’s sculptures are built from fabric coated in chickpea clay and stretched taut — or twisted and draped — across wood, wire, and metal structures, producing surfaces that read alternately as topographic landscapes and animal hides. She often backlights the pieces, using illumination to draw out the material’s texture and expose the armature beneath, so the works read simultaneously as skin, terrain, and structure.
Trained as an architect, she brings a builder’s attention to armature and frame even as the surface material remains resolutely domestic and improvised. The work is explicitly autobiographical: large-scale pieces such as Chickpea Landscapes, 12 and Chickpea Landscapes, Femme reference her observations of Beirut following the August 2020 port explosion and the country’s economic collapse, while chickpeas themselves stand in for a food shared across Middle Eastern cuisines — a point of cultural connection running beneath the political content. Smaller, wire-framed works in the Little Guy Big Energy series read as loose architectural studies, linking the sculptural practice back to her design training.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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