Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Ceramics, painting, installation, works on paper
Website: pazgstudio.com
Paz G (they/them), born Maria Paz in 1989 in Quilpué, Chile, is a self-taught ceramic sculptor and painter based in Oakland, California. Paz immigrated to the United States and has built an acclaimed practice that draws on personal and family history, using the ceramic vessel as an archival form — a way of documenting displacement, identity, and the inherited knowledge carried across generations. Their work has been described as an act of resilience and resistance, centering on what it means to reconstruct bonds severed by migration.
Paz rose to regional prominence through a series of high-profile Bay Area exhibitions, most notably inclusion in Bay Area Now 9 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (2023–2024), YBCA’s flagship triennial showcasing the most vital artists working across the nine-county Bay Area. In 2024 they were named one of 16 finalists for the SFMOMA SECA Art Award, one of the most significant honors for emerging Bay Area artists. That same year their work appeared in Ritual Clay: Cathy Lu, Paz G, Maryam Yousif at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, a museum show that ran through May 2025 and positioned Paz alongside fellow Bay Area ceramic artists who use clay to examine ancestry, cultural hybridity, and spiritual mythology.
Paz G works primarily in ceramic sculpture, oil painting, works on paper, and installation. Their ceramic pieces are often cavernous, hole-punctured forms — vessels that simultaneously suggest the body, ruins, and ritual objects — adorned with figurative vignettes, painted portraits, and urgent hand-lettered text. Paz has spoken of making “sculptures about sound,” translating resistance music and ancestral song into physical form. More recently their practice has expanded into large-scale oil paintings that meditate on systems of domination and power, love, and what they call “the spiritual consequences of lovelessness.” Across mediums, the work operates at the intersection of personal mythology, political urgency, and spiritual transmission.
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