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For artist Nicki Green, very little in the world is binary: black or white, good or bad, right or wrong.

That belief is behind the title of her exhibition “Nicki Green: Firmament,” which opened Thursday at San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum. “Firmament,” or “raqia” in Hebrew, refers in Genesis to an amorphous space that separates earth from the heavens. It is also how Green, a 37-year-old trans woman who works primarily in clay, contextualizes queer and trans people in relation to the world. They travel “fluidly with no hard boundaries,” she said, and in bodies that are “always in flux and in transition.”

The CJM show, the first solo exhibition at the museum for a trans artist, according to senior curator Heidi Rabben, is a “joyful exploration” of the multiple ways that Jewish and transgender identities intersect in time and space. Among the more than two dozen pieces in the show are human-scale representations in ceramic of the highest-ranking angels in Jewish tradition: Michael, Uriel, Raphael and Gavriel.

Depicted as androgynous figures luxuriating among ritual objects, the angels are situated under a tent-like yarn structure assembled by Ricki Dwyer, a longtime collaborator with Green. The tent, according to both Rabben and Green, represents the Tabernacle, the portable sanctuary that the Israelites built for themselves during their 40 years of wandering in the desert. The tent also signifies ill-defined space.

A number of objects in “Firmament” speak to Green’s other aesthetic preoccupations, including mycology (study of fungi), fermentation and the mikvah, or ritual bath. 

A number of Green’s clay vessels, for instance, feature representations of mushrooms, which the artist describes as a “metaphor for queerness ”— to wit, some fungi have thousands of sexes.  

She added that the act of fermentation is akin to the process that many trans people experience as they transition from one state of being to another. As for the mikvah, “I was trying to find a way to ritualize or mark” the time following a Jewish trans woman’s gender-affirming procedures. 

Wrapping the perimeter of the CJM’s gallery walls is lyrical text by Eli Ramer, a Jewish storyteller and longtime friend who also publishes under the name Andrew Eli Ramer. Ramer’s playful riff on the names of the four angels — Michael, Michelle, Micky … Gabriel, Gabriellex, Gabrielle … Uriel, Uriella, Uri … Raphael, Rafi, Rafaluna — along with other linguistic liberties, emphasizes Green’s underlying message that there are many ways of defining people and objects. 

Green now lives in New York where she works as an assistant professor of ceramics at Alfred University, but she earned a bachelor’s degree at the San Francisco Art Institute and a master’s in fine arts at UC Berkeley. Her years in the Bay Area served as a catalyst in her development as a trans woman with a thirst for Jewish learning. Everything fell into place for her, she said, after she attended a Northern California camp session run by Svara, a yeshiva devoted to Talmud study for queer and trans people.

“I’ve always had an intuitive interest” in Jewish texts, she said, dating back to her childhood and youth in suburban Boston, where she and her family were members of a Reform synagogue. “But it really took being in the Bay Area [and meeting] trans Jews and trans rabbis” for her to integrate her trans and Jewish selves.

The medium of clay is ideal for exploring trans identities, Green noted.

“Clay has the potential to be life-giving, like creation stories,” including the golem in Jewish folklore, she said. And it can come in many physical states: “liquid, semi-pliable, rock-solid … like mud.” Clay can also “perform as another material” and can be made to “look like metal.”

The CJM exhibit is not the only local opportunity to encounter Green’s works. San Francisco gallery CULT Aimee Friberg is presenting “Eye of the Fountain,” a solo exhibition of Green’s work that opens Friday. 

They point out, as does the artist, that while the visual cues of “Firmament” have an upward focus — those entering the exhibit in the museum look up toward the tent — the structure of “Eye of the Fountain” and the gallery’s architecture lend themselves to a downward gaze. Gallerygoers ascending CULT’s staircase can look down toward the ground level, where Green’s androgynous, human-sized ceramic figures are partaking in the mikvah. It is, said Friberg, both a “secular and sacred” experience for the viewer.

Like the CJM exhibit, the CULT show includes Green’s vessels and other earthenware with mycological motifs. 

“Firmament”

Through Feb. 2 at the CJM, 736 Mission St., San Francisco. Exhibit included in museum admission: $16.

“Eye of the Fountain”

Through Nov. 16. CULT Aimee Friberg, 1401 16th St., San Francisco. Free. Opening reception is set for 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Friday. An artist’s talk is scheduled for 1 p.m. Saturday.