Lively conversation reverberated through the walls of the Ruth Chandler Williamson gallery at Scripps College as visitors experimented with digitized ceramic experiences, interacted with performance art and engaged with sculptures and floor-to-ceiling paintings.
The 79th Ceramic Annual opened to the public on the evening of Jan. 27 with the theme “The Idea of Feeling Brown.” Curator Jasmine Baetz, Scripps’ Lincoln visiting artist in ceramics, organized the show around the central theme of brownness as community and resistance, drawing inspiration from the work of queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz.
In the exhibition’s catalog, artist Kristie Soares explains that each artist formulated personal responses to Muñoz’s concept of brownness as far more than just a phenotypic marker.
True to Muñoz’s expansive vision, the pieces in this exhibition incorporate a variety of art forms, such as augmented reality (AR), oxidized paintings and performance, to embody the ways that brownness “walks, breathes [and] fights in a world organized by and for whiteness and in an art realm that often replicates these power dynamics.”
Upon entering the gallery, Magdolene Dykstra’s vast, floor-to-ceiling finger painting catches the eye in both form and scale. Using soil, clay and naturally occurring oxides, Dykstra’s work is inspired by prehistoric cave paintings where early human left handprints on the walls.
Each artist’s mediums and presentations differ greatly from one another, yet stand united in their central theme of conceiving of brownness beyond trauma. Television screens scattered around the room display content from intergenerational interviews with Indo-Caribbean families to a performance art piece depicting a woman sculpting with her teeth.
Attendee Daniella Zepeda SC ’27 expressed how the work subverted her conceptions of what a ceramics show entails.
“When we think about ceramics … it inherently has to do with your body,” Zepeda said. “Watching the video of [contributing artist Raheleh Filsoofi] creating ‘BITE,’ actually making patterns with your teeth and tasting it, it visualizes this sensory, all-encompassing feeling that ceramics gives you.”
Contributing artist Habiba El-Sayed described how ideas from both Egyptian mythology and ’90s childhood nostalgia inspired her two pieces for the exhibit: a combination of clay sculpting and AR interaction titled “Ba-bie Soul House” and a virtual reality experience titled “Unstolen.”
“Exploring my identity through clay, performance and digital means allows me to exist within these spaces and institutions, not trying to fit in but rather intervening and interjecting within them.”
Drawing on elements of her cultural background as a Guyanese-Egyptian Canadian, El-Sayed spoke about how these pieces fit into her journey as an artist as she works to move beyond narratives of brownness centered around trauma and violence.
“Beyond all the ethical parts, it just gets boring,” El-Sayed said. “I don’t think any of us want to keep creating trauma all the time — we have other parts of us that we want to be exploring in our work.”
Despite grassroots movements to expand the range and visibility of BIPOC individuals in the art world, she explained, the field of ceramics remains dominated by white curators whose shows often exude elements of saviorism and tokenization.
“Exploring my identity through clay, performance and digital means allows me to exist within these spaces and institutions, not trying to fit in but rather intervening and interjecting within them,” El-Sayed said.
Across the gallery from El-Sayed’s work, Trinidadian artist Heidi McKenzie presents a series of images of women, each smiling fiercely as they hold a photo of another Indo-Caribbean woman they admire. Illuminated from behind, these photographs cast a warm light across the floor as joy emanates from the women’s faces.
McKenzie holds space for these women by showcasing their joy as they proudly display their heritage in a way that moves past trauma. “Brownness,” immigration and otherness are not inherently traumatic concepts, McKenzie’s work asserts, but instead identities that hold the weight and warmth of a community united in joy.
Drawing parallels between predominant narratives of brownness and the field of ceramics, Baetz described how rigidness within the definition of “ceramics” mirrors identity policing.
“I’m not interested in other hierarchies and supremacies,” Baetz said. “I’m not very interested in the tightly gatekept ceramics universe that’s limited to a particular way of understanding the material or process.”
As part of their collaborative zine, the students in Baetz’s class “Special Topics in Ceramics: Feeling Brown” read Muñoz’s “The Sense of Brown” and created ceramic sculptures that explored each person’s “individual, different and yet connected ideas around ‘feeling brown.’”
The published zine is available for free at the Williamson Gallery.
“Insofar as I’m affiliated with an institution, I’m always going to use that space to enact the kind of art and future that I think we should all have together,” Baetz said.
The 79th Scripps College Ceramic Annual: The Idea of Feeling Brown is open Wednesday through Sunday from 12 to 4 p.m. through April 7, 2024.
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