About the Artist

An innovative artist and art educator for more than thirty years, Syma has recently returned to New York City, after living in London, England, for nearly four years. While in the UK, she maintained a studio at Cockpit Arts. Currently a freelance Artist/Lecturer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she is also available as a visiting artist in New York City through ARTS CONNECTION. Syma has set up her new ceramic studio in Brooklyn and is currently at work on private and public art commissions in hand-made sculpted ceramic tiles, as well as works for galleries and shops.

In 2006, Red Door Gallery in London presented a solo show of her smoke-fired ceramics with 24 karat English gold leaf. Inspired by artifacts and mythologies of ancient cultures, this series was begun as Syma’s response to living in England.

A former proprietor of a contemporary craft gallery in Hingham, MA. in the 1970s, Syma has exhibited her clay and mixed media works for nearly thirty years throughout the US., and more recently in the UK. Collectors of Syma’s work include the Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, MA; Susan Paine, Cambridge, MA; Michael Heller, of Heller Gallery, NYC; Sydney and Ann Levinson, London, UK.

Since 1985, Syma has worked in collaboration with architects, private clients, and industry, in the design and fabrication of site-specific, bas-relief panels. Her monumental cast concrete and sculpted brick architectural details have been integrated into Philadelphia and Boston area building facades. Smaller scale projects include a ceramic sculpted tile fireplace surround, created as a visual interpretation of a client's poem, and sculpted tile representations of the elements of Chinese medicine for the treatment rooms of a New York City doctor.

During her extensive visiting-artist/teaching career, Syma has worked with children, teens, adults, senior citizens, and hospitalized patients in locked wards, encouraging each person to express his or her own creativity through the arts. Many New York and Boston area schools contain permanent installations of site-specific art designed by Syma’s students. She has taught ceramics at City University of New York’s Kingsborough campus in Brooklyn, and at New York City’s Greenwich House Pottery. Syma led pottery making workshops at the British Museum in connection with their exhibition of the ancient treasures of Sudan.

Syma has received numerous artist grants and awards, including an NEA stipend, and an EARTHWATCH fellowship for an archaeological dig in Mallorca, Spain. Syma was selected to participate in the 2006 International Architectural Ceramics Symposium at ICSHU, in Kecskemet, Hungary.

Syma is the artist formerly known as Marsha Syma Gordon Komarin Afia.

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All images copyright SYMA 2002