Jami Porter Lara

Jami Porter Lara (born 1969 in Spokane, Washington) 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. Porter Lara's work is in public and private collections nationwide, and has been featured in Art 21 Magazine, CFile, Hyperallergic, and on PBS. In 2017, Artsy named her one of the artists shaping the future of ceramics. She is represented by form & concept in Santa Fe, and Simon Breitbard Fine Arts in San Francisco.

Education Porter Lara moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico as a young child in 1980, and later attended the University of New Mexico, 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. In the 1970s, a Pueblo pottery revival took place in Mata Ortiz. People there started making ceramic pots that bore stylistic relation to ancient pot sherds and artifacts found in that vicinity, from the Casas Grandes and Mimbres cultures. They locally sourced their materials and discovered how to make ceramic vessels using 2,000 year old techniques. Porter Lara says “they showed us how to soak the clay and filter it and then let it dry. They also taught us how to build out of coils and how to burnish with a stone.” In this way the forms and meaning of Porter Lara’s art are distinctly contemporary, but her materials and techniques connect her work to the Southwest and to people who preceded her in the region.

Work

Ceramics 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, 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, covered with a galvanized aluminum tub. During the reduction process, the pottery is kept away from flames and oxygen. Carbon released by sawdust and newspaper surrounding the work bonds with the clay and turns the vessels black. In the same places she found water bottles, it is also possible to find potsherds and other artifacts left by people thousands of years before. When Porter Lara returned to New Mexico, she kept on reflecting on the idea of how the plastic bottle and the potsherd are essentially the same thing. Both constitute precious objects, vessels, with the ability of sustaining life. She "began to think about them as evidence of an ancient and unbroken flow -- of people, culture, plants and animals-- that continues in spite of attempts to sever it." Her work reflects on the necessity of water for human life and a concept that Porter Lara calls "reverse archeology." The reverse archaeological process refers to her digging into issues of the present and the future by applying tools of the past.

Porter Lara's work also engages with the industrialized mass production that characterizes modern consumer culture, while recognizing the harmful impact of this on society, she also states "Saying that humans are only pollutants is a failure of imagination. Yes, we’re destructive, but we’re also creative. . . . I want to create the possibility that we can see things differently and contribute to the world. My work is my refusal to say that the earth would be better without me, and the determination to become equal to that claim. Peters Projects, a Santa Fe, NMgallery, presented a solo exhibition, In Situ, in 2017. She was represented by .

Porter Lara also had a solo exhibition in 2017 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts called Border Crossing.

In 2019, Porter Lara was commissioned by the U.S. State Department Art in Embassies Program to create an installation of her sculptures for the Matamoros Consulate.