After the Island: Ornament and Ceramic Practice in the Jamaican Diaspora @ MoAD

Join for an Artist Talk with the three artists from After the Island: Ornament and Ceramic Practice in the Jamaican Diaspora – PJ Anderson, Jacqueline Bishop and Sharon Norwood, in conversation with Curator Key Jo Lee.

About the Exhibition

The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) presents After the Island: Ornament and Ceramic Practice in the Jamaican Diaspora, a landmark curatorial partnership with Black Artists’ Network in Dialogue (Toronto), Gardiner Museum (Toronto), exploring contemporary ceramic practices shaped by Caribbean histories, memory, and cultural transformation.‍

Featuring PJ Anderson, Jacqueline Bishop, and Sharon Norwood, the exhibition considers how culture is carried across migration and remade through distance. Each artist approaches Jamaica from a different point along the diasporic continuum: through lived memory, inherited history, or an ancestral connection reconstructed across generations. Their works reveal ornament as a living language, capable of holding what has been remembered, fragmented, lost, and newly imagined.

Across porcelain, hand-built vessels, archival imagery, line, pattern, and burnished clay, the artists draw out the entangled histories embedded in ceramic form. European porcelain once projected refinement and imperial power, while African ceramic traditions carried social identity, sacred knowledge, and ancestral presence. In the Caribbean, these visual systems collided and evolved into hybrid languages shaped by colonialism, survival, and invention.

After the Island invites visitors to look beyond decoration and discover what a surface can carry. Here, ornament becomes archive, assertion, remembrance, and a way of making relation. Together, these artists offer a powerful meditation on how ancestral connection survives movement through the creative act of shaping it again.‍‍

Joint-Museum Partnership

After the Island emerges out of a collaboration between Black Artists’ Network in Dialogue (Toronto), Gardiner Museum (Toronto), and the Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco). Together, the three organizations developed two concurrent exhibitions featuring how artists of Caribbean descent are using ceramics to explore themes of labour, the body, and groundedness from differing perspectives.‍

The exhibitions propose a broader understanding of Caribbean ceramic practice as a dynamic field shaped by movement, exchange, and cultural continuity. Rather than treating the Caribbean as a fixed geographic location, both exhibitions consider it an ongoing network of relationships extending across national borders and generations. Throughout both presentations, vessels, decorative forms, sculptural installations, and ceramic surfaces become sites where histories are preserved, challenged, reimagined, and carried forward. Clay becomes a medium through which artists investigate how memory survives through material culture and how cultural traditions continue to evolve within contemporary diasporic life.