Art Week NYC: after his Met residency, Egyptian artist Ibrahim Said makes time the material

For a potter raised among the kilns of Fustat, the old ceramics quarter of Cairo where clay has been fired for centuries, time is not an abstraction but a working material. Ibrahim Said has spent the last year and a half inside the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and what came out of that stretch now fills Yossi Milo’s Chelsea galleries under a title that states his whole proposition: Shaping Time.

The gallery is one of the stops on the Chelsea Gallery Evening of Art Week NYC, the new citywide festival presented by Artforum together with ARTnews and Art in America. Shaping Time is his second solo presentation with Yossi Milo, and it lands as he completes his term as one of the three inaugural artists of the Artisan Residency run by the Met and the Swiss watchmaker Vacheron Constantin, a program devoted to preserving and reinterpreting traditional craft that gave him sustained access to the museum’s holdings.

Clusters of geometric ceramic plates on the wall and a sculptural earthenware form on a plinth by Ibrahim Said — Installation view, Ibrahim Said: Shaping Time. Image: courtesy Yossi Milo, New York

Start with what is in the room. Vessels rise on plinths in stacked, double-bodied forms, their walls cut through into lattices so dense that light passes into the clay. On one wall, dozens of small geometric plates gather into clusters that read as a single pattern spreading past its own edges. The earthenware is pierced, folded and mirrored, and the labor stays visible: every opening is a decision made by hand.

In the exhibition text, the gallery frames time not as a line running from past to future but as a layered condition in which histories and imagined futures keep overlapping, moving between linear time and sacred, spiritual and cosmic time. Two traditions carry the argument. From ancient Egyptian art he takes scale as a language of hierarchy and of the afterlife. From Islamic geometry he takes repetition as a figure for infinity: latticework, hexagons, the six-pointed Star of David and the Coptic cross set with star forms. Rather than dissolving those religious vocabularies into one, he looks, in the gallery’s words, toward a common humanity within religious experience.

That is the decisive choice here: pattern as duration. A latticed surface is a record of the hours it took to cut, and Said lets that record stand as the content of the work. Ancient forms are neither treated as relics nor set against the future, and some pieces look almost futuristic. The same object faces both ways.

Five tall perforated earthenware vessels by Ibrahim Said in a row on white plinths — Installation view, Ibrahim Said: Shaping Time. Image: courtesy Yossi Milo, New York

Born in Cairo in 1976 and now based in North Carolina, Said already has work in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Museum of Scotland. The Brooklyn Museum acquired his Hourglass in 2024, the year he received the Maxwell/Hanrahan Award in Craft, and in 2025 the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery acquired Reflection.

Shaping Time opened on October 22 and runs through January 9, 2027, at Yossi Milo, 245 Tenth Avenue. The Chelsea Gallery Evening takes place on Thursday, November 12, from 6 to 8 PM, in the middle of an Art Week NYC that runs from November 11 to 14.

For an artist whose material keeps every mark of the hand that shaped it, eighteen months among the Met’s objects were never going to produce nostalgia. They produced a room in which the past reads as another tense of the present.

Tags: art exhibitions, ceramics, Yossi Milo, Art Week NYC, Ibrahim Said, Metropolitan Museum of Art