The work is a study for Luminous Ground, a site-specific installation now on view now at di Rosa that consists of one thousand tiles made by hand from local soil and exposed to the sun to mirror the cosmos above.

Ala Ebtekar is an artist who works between his native San Francisco Bay Area and Tehran, Iran. He currently teaches at Stanford University in the Department of Art & Art History and Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford. He is the founder and director of Art, Social Space and Public Discourse, a Stanford global initiative on art that investigates the multiple contexts that shift and define changing ideas of public space. This ongoing critical framework of conversations, newly commissioned art projects, and exploration of various cultural productions and intellectual traditions looks at recent transformations of civic life.

His work has been exhibited widely internationally and throughout the United States in such shows as The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989 at the ZKM – Museum for Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe, Germany, the 2014 Xinjiang Biennale, the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, The Beginning of Thinking is Geometric at the Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah, UAE, One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now, a touring exhibition originating at the Asia Society, NYC, and Migrating Identities at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Ebtekar’s works are in public and private collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; Devi Art Foundation, India; Orange County Museum of Art, CA, USA; de Young Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco, USA; Crocker Art Museum, CA, USA; Berkeley Art Museum, CA, USA; among others. He has been awarded residencies at ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany, Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France, 18th Street Art Center in Los Angeles, Sazmanab in Tehran, Iran, and the San Francisco Center for the Book.