As the co-curators of a new exhibit at the Springfield Museums write in a book from which the exhibit is drawn, ceramic art “permeates time, connecting culture and people as well as culture and technology.”
And for Black ceramicists today, working with clay can be an important means of exploring ancestral and cultural knowledge from Africa as well as historical legacies in the U.S., from enslavement in the past to calls for social justice today.
At the D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield, “A Gathering” features works by 36 Black contemporary ceramic artists, in which the pieces have been shaped by these and other themes, such as Black beauty, as well as stories of connection, celebration, and triumph.
“I think [the exhibit] covers a range of issues for the artists,” said Heather Haskell, director of the Springfield Museums, during a recent tour of the show. “Heritage, history, identity, memory — there are a number of themes at work.”
The artists themselves hail from many different states: California, Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky, New York, North and South Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Washington and more.
And they’ve contributed a wide variety of work to the exhibit, from pieces formed from a traditional potter’s wheel to intricate designs that incorporate diverse elements — such as dried flowers taken from one artist’s garden — to sculptures that draw on other media, from quilting to graffiti to printmaking.
In “Earth Seed’s Quilt,” for instance, Colorado artist Ellmaria Foley-Ray has connected some 69 clay tiles, of two sizes and varied color and design, with small cotton cords to simulate a quilt.
Foley-Ray, a professor of anthropology in Denver, Colorado, writes in exhibit notes that her design is both a means of honoring the quilt-making tradition of African American women and a way to tell stories about some of their experiences.
Clay is a means for examining human culture in general, she notes: “I see clay as the paper on which I write.”
Co-curators Donald A Clark and Chotsani Elaine Dean approached the project from different backgrounds, but also from a shared goal of wanting to highlight contemporary Black ceramic artists at varied stages of their careers, whose work they say has not been given much recognition.
Clark, who lives in Springfield, is a longtime ceramic collector and art dealer who’s been involved in the field in other ways, such as the research manager for The Marks Project, a searchable online database that documents the marks of ceramic makers who have worked in the U.S. since 1946.
Dean, a ceramic artist who teaches at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, grew up in Hartford, Connecticut and received her BFA in ceramics from Hartford Art School. She has exhibited, taught and led workshops in a number of places, from Connecticut to South Carolina to India; she moved to Minneapolis in 2020.
The two have co-written a book, “Contemporary Black American Ceramic Artists” — the first book to profile such artists, Dean says — from which the exhibit has been drawn. The show, created by the Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis, has traveled to a number of places before making its final stop in Springfield.
In a recent phone call from Minneapolis, Dean said she was initially drawn into the project after Clark, who wanted to create a book featuring Black ceramic artists, contacted her about including a chapter on her; it was early in the process, and he then asked her to co-author the book.
“He had seen some of my work in Connecticut before and realized who I was,” Dean said, noting that the work she and Clark did on their book, which began in 2020, was all accomplished via phone calls, email, and Zoom sessions, including interviews with the artists.
With a laugh, Clark said he and Dean finally met in person, as the book was being finalized, “in a coffee shop in Middletown, Connecticut.”
Dean noted that she and Clark didn’t initially envision that their book would inspire an exhibition, even if “we encouraged each other to dream and think big.”
In the end, the two authors and curators are grateful the Northern Clay Center decided to create “A Gathering” to give the artists profiled in their book even more exposure.
And Clark says they’re both indebted to the artists themselves “who took all this time to talk with us, to share their stories … we wanted this book to consist mostly of their words, with just enough words from us to hold it together.”
Haskell, for one, says she’s particularly intrigued by a piece in the exhibit by identical twin brothers Kyle and Kelly Phelps, who work together in Ohio.
“Joanne,” a work of clay, mixed media and paint, is a figure of what might be a utility worker, wearing thick pants and boots, and holding a hard hat against her body. Like much of the brothers’ work, the figure is placed inside a small framework, in this case constructed from found materials, that recalls the look of religious shrines.
“It looks like a reliquary,” Haskell said. “It has that kind of iconography.”
In exhibit notes, the brothers say they grew up in a “blue collar/factory environment,” and thus “As two Black men, we needed to represent the Black experience. We are interested in showing the invisible people who make America run.”
Another striking piece is “Ancestor 1” by Aisha Harrison of Olympia, Washington, whose clay and graphite work depicts a partial human figure crowned with a row of trees representing western red cedars.
Red threads connect the two sections, which Harrison says represents her family’s deep ties both to their home and to the Pacific Northwest landscape: “I see them as roots, veins, blood, long lines that connect us through time forward and backward.”
And Keith Wallace Smith, who lives in Georgia, has created a lifelike image of the American folklore figure John Henry, the Black “steel-driving man” who hammered a steel drill into rock to make holes for explosives for blasting during the construction of railroad tunnels.
According to legend, John Henry died from heart failure just after defeating a steam-powered rock drill in a race to build a tunnel — and Smith’s sculpture captures the moment when John Henry achieves martyrdom in besting the machine.
For her part, Chotsani has produced a range of work that considers the cultivation of cotton, including how enslaved people were once forced to do that back-breaking work in the U.S. South.
The exhibit includes one of her pieces, “Memory Spoon: ‘minding my garden, as they did their gardens,’” a ceramic sculpture that includes a number of other materials, including dried flowers from her garden, where she grows small amounts of cotton.
“Incorporating the flowers and seeds from my garden is a way to continue working in my garden out of season,” she writes in exhibit notes.
Chotsani Elaine Dean and Donald Clark will be at “A Gathering” Nov. 12 from 2 to 4 p.m. to discuss the exhibit with visitors looking for additional information about the show. The exhibit runs through March 24.
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.