About Ibrahim Khazzaka
Ibrahim Khazzaka is a transnational artist working primarily in ceramics, sculpture, and installation. Before becoming a full-time artist and educator, he worked in psychology and education across Lebanon, Dubai, and Los Angeles. In 2018, he moved to New York City to focus on his studio practice, completing his MFA in ceramics from SUNY New Paltz in 2023. He has taught at the State University of New York, New Paltz, and at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona, where he was recently selected by Creative West to represent Arizona as a fellow for the 2025 National Leader of Color in the arts cohort.
The Work
Khazzaka's practice is rooted in the ceramic process: color, sensuality, and material transformation. His recent exhibition, The Veils of Dawn, featured ceramic pieces inspired by Southwest sunrises and sunsets, works that explore the tension between discomfort and sensorial belonging, between feeling alienated and finding home.
Color is central to his work, and he uses it to push back against a certain sterile minimalism that dominates contemporary spaces. There's an intentional maximalism here: layered surfaces, rich glazes, forms that demand to be touched (even when you can't). He wants his work to pull attention, wake up your senses, all while being didactic.
His sculptures carry symbols of migration and displacement. Having moved across continents multiple times, Khazzaka understands identity as something constantly being rebuilt. Clay becomes the perfect metaphor for this—a material that's always in flux, always responsive to pressure and heat. Every piece holds traces of where he's been: Middle Eastern decorative traditions, the glossy excess of Dubai, the sprawl of Los Angeles, the contradictions of the American Southwest.
Process and Materials
Khazzaka brings together thinking and making. His hands work clay through ideas that his mind can't quite articulate yet. He combines ceramics with wood, paper, and digital technologies, responding to each material as a way to index time, memory, and cultural residue.
There's something sincere about this approach, even when the work gets playful or absurd. He's interested in hybridity as a lived experience. What does it mean to belong to multiple places and no place? How do objects carry experiences that official narratives ignore? How can a glaze development connect us to artisans from centuries ago?
His installations aim at creating postcolonial histories, where making political statements becomes building spaces where care, intimacy, and alternative cosmologies can exist. He reclaims vernacular forms, vessels, architectural elements, and everyday objects and reshapes them into something that is urgently contemporary.
Philosophy
"Engaging with malleable materials like clay allows me to explore my perceptions and my identity in flux, making my art a tool for me to make sense of it all."
At its core, Khazzaka's work asks: How do we create belonging when home is fractured?
How do we hold multiple truths at once?
How do we build intimacy, with objects, with history, with each other, in a world that increasingly flattens everything into data?
The work doesn't offer easy answers. Instead, it invites you to sit with complexity, to contemplate beauty and loss simultaneously, and to recognize that transformation is ongoing and never complete.