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

This landmark exhibition brings together three contemporary artists—PJ Anderson, Jacqueline Bishop, and Sharon Norwood—to explore how Caribbean communities preserve, transform, and carry cultural identity through ceramic practice across generations and borders. The show examines ornament as a powerful archive, where patterns, surfaces, and vessels become vessels themselves for memory, resistance, and ancestral connection. Drawing on histories shaped by colonialism, survival, and creative invention, these artists demonstrate how clay becomes a medium for making visible what migration, displacement, and time might otherwise obscure. A collaboration between MoAD, Black Artists' Network in Dialogue, and the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, the exhibition invites visitors to look beyond decoration and discover the profound stories embedded in form, texture, and cultural continuity.