About
Pam Douglas is a Los Angeles mixed media artist who creates sculpture, painting and installations that continue her dedication to humanitarian issues. Mostly figurative, her work is an expressionistic naturalism. Her exhibits include the California African American Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles Art Show, and USC Fisher Museum of Art.
Recent grants and awards include the Puffin Foundation, Mozaik Philanthropy, Vibrant Cities, Repaint History, The Next Big Thing, and others.
She grew up in New York City, close to her immigrant grandmother and says, “Even now – especially now -- the pulse of those early years is in my art.”
Her Sanctuary project presented more than 50 elements, filling the entire downstairs at TAG in 2021, and incorporated sculpture, painting, and assemblage. In Part One figures walk to safety in wall-hung panels. In Part Two simulated 3-dimensional rafts escape across a gallery floor. Part Three are survivors in handmade tents.
At the close of Sanctuary, she expanded to an artbook/graphic novel, “Bearing Witness,” that tells the stories of refugee families. It is now with a literary agent.
Her paintings based on the book have been exhibited at the Ontario Museum of Art, the Human Rights Exhibition at the College of Sequoias, the Irvine Fine Arts Center, Los Angeles Art Association and elsewhere.
In 2023 her 12 life-size Witness sculptures were awarded a solo installation at Tarfest, produced by LAUNCH, and she presented an installation that included elements of Sanctuary along with Witnesses at the last CA101.
Now she is introducing a new immersive multimedia project: “The End of the Unsaid.” In collaboration with her daughter, poet/musician Raya Yarbrough, she explores global tensions and their mixed-race ancestry with an uplifting spiritual intent. Their September show at TAG includes live concerts, bridging art forms.
Art critic Shana Nys Dambrot wrote: “Pam Douglas has an alchemical gift for transmogrifying materials beyond their conventional aspects in the service of emotionally rich, conceptually profound mixed media works.”
Her “Sanctuary” installation garnered praise from art critic Genie Davis, published in Art and Cake: “This is a passion project for the artist, and it is a fierce, galvanizing, heartbreaking one … an awe-inspiring experience.”
Artist Statment
I am a mixed-media artist at the precipice of the most productive period of my decades-long career. Currently, I’m preparing for my solo exhibition in 2025 that will premiere as a 3,000 sq. foot installation at TAG in September.
I aim to produce an immersive experience dedicated to crossing cultural boundaries and exploring my legacy as a multi-racial woman. I am making approximately 40 paintings and sculptural arrangements, some of which are as large as 18 feet long by 7 feet high. In this exhibition, visitors will inhabit poems by walking through paintings. This work is made in collaboration with poetry and music by my daughter, the award-winning composer/singer/writer Raya Yarbrough. This is a challenging time for poetry when words are weaponized and emptied of meaning. This exhibit pushes back.
Previously, the past eight years of my art have been a sustained response to refugees forced from their homes because of violence and climate change. The “Sanctuary” project, my “Bearing Witness” paintings, and “Witness” sculptures express refugee experiences through a mixture of drawing, painting, sculpture, assemblage, and installation. Mostly figurative, my work includes abstract elements, plant parts, and found objects, in a kind of expressionistic naturalism.
For my “Sanctuary” project, I initially created life-size mixed-media panels of figures walking to what they believed would be safety. Then I crafted symbolic three-dimensional rafts that escape across a gallery floor. At the close of the “Sanctuary” installation, I felt the figures pressed me to tell their stories beyond what could be revealed in the show. “Bearing Witness,” a graphic novel, and a series of paintings based on the book followed in 2022. The paintings include works on unusual surfaces such as painted silk. I also re-purposed scraps of a torn plastic drop-cloth that have extraordinary abstract design and colors. Strategies of assemblage and recycling found materials have been present in all my artwork.
In 2023, I created my “Witness” sculptures, echoing 12 in a jury, 12 apostles, and the passage of time. These free-standing life-size figures engage viewers personally, as their faces are at the same level as the audience.
Previous to both “Sanctuary” and “Witness,” I produced iconic plant-based constructions that suggest women are forces of nature in my 2018 TAG solo “Artifacts of Grace.” These are in dialog with the artwork of other assemblage sculptors I admire, such as Allison Saar and Senga Nengudi.