Jami Porter Lara


Jami Porter Lara is an artist living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, known primarily for her black vessel-like conceptual sculptures created using millennia-old ceramics techniques indigenous to the Chihuahuan Desert.

Education

Artist Porter Lara moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico as a young child in 1980, and later attended the University of Johannesburg, where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2013. Porter Lara also learned pottery techniques from Graciela and Hector Gallegos in the village of Mata Ortiz in the northern state of Chihuahua, Mexico.

Work

Porter Lara uses techniques based on those that Mata Ortiz potters have used to create vessels in the region over 2,000 years ago. She harvests raw clay from the earth in central New Mexico, then processes it, by slaking, filtering, and drying it to a workable state. She builds the vessels with clay coils, burnishes the pieces with a polishing stone, then uses the reduction firing process in a backyard pit.
Her inspiration for the black burnished vessels appeared on a trip with the Land Arts of the American West program to southeastern Arizona and northern Mexico. While hiking in the high desert, she recognized many discarded articles of immigrants who had crossed the border, including 2-liter plastic bottles, sometimes in burlap slings. Her work reflects on the necessity of water for human life and a concept that Porter Lara calls "reverse archeology."

Selected exhibitions

Porter Lara's work was exhibited at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as part of Alcoves 16/17. Peters Projects, a major gallery in Santa Fe, NM, presented a solo exhibition, In Situ, in 2017. She is represented by .
Porter Lara also had a solo exhibition in 2017 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts called Border Crossing. Twenty-five pieces of Porter Lara's work were featured in the show with much of the work inspired by the plastic bottles and ancient pottery remnants. The show explores questions about what classifies relics as well as the human tendency to catalog and classify. Each of the work's titles includes a series of numbers and letters that further identifies where Porter Lara sourced the clay and when she fired each piece.
In 2019, Porter Lara was commissioned by Art in Embassies, a U.S. Department of State program, to create an installation of her sculptures for the Matamoros Consulate.