Cammie Staros: Pompeii
Nazarian / Curcio is pleased to present Pompeii, an installation of new sculptures by Los Angeles-based artist Cammie Staros. For her fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, Staros invokes the ancient city’s destruction as a lens through which to view our contemporary moment—one marked by environmental precarity, sudden disruption, and shifting historical narratives. Created in the year following the 2025 wildfires in Los Angeles, Pompeii examines how fragility and endurance intertwine, using the language of archaeology and classical craft to consider collapse, preservation, and the traces that remain.
Central to the exhibition is a hand-made ceramic floor of fired earthenware tiles Staros has been making and accumulating for over a decade. Fired to varying degrees of maturity, the tiles are intentionally unstable, cracking underfoot as visitors move through the space. Over time, the path worn into the floor becomes an evolving record of those who have come before.
Cammie Staros (b. 1983, Nashville, TN; Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) received her BA from Brown University, Providence, in 2006 and her MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, in 2011. Staros has had solo exhibitions at Providence College Galleries, Providence, RI; The SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont, CA; Nazarian / Curcio, Los Angeles, Lefebvre & Fils, Paris, and Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles. The artist was included in the Craft Contemporary’s second clay biennial in Los Angeles. Staros’ work is featured in 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow, a survey of contemporary sculpture, authored by Kurt Beers and published by Thames & Hudson. She has also been featured in Artforum, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, Autre Magazine, and the X–TRA art journal. She has been awarded residencies by the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Anderson Ranch Arts Center.
Staros’ work is in the permanent collection of the Seattle Art Museum, WA; SCAD Museum, Savannah, GA; the Orange County Museum of Art, CA; and the Hood Museum of Art, NH. She was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2020 and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2023.