Clay as Living Archive

Please join us on Monday, September 15, from 6-7:30pm for a conversation on Clay as Living Archive with curator Dr. Jareh Das, and artists Adebunmi Gbadebo and Anina Major with moderation by Lauren Tate Baeza.

The dialogue will explore clay’s material memory, its archival relationship to land, as well as making-methods such as hand-building that traverse geographies and generations. Through exploring the legacies of Black women ceramicists, the panelists will discuss the matrilineal traditions that inspire the contemporary generation’s practices and material approaches.

This event is presented as part of the gallery exhibition Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art on view September 10 through December 6, 2025.

About the Speakers

Dr. Jareh Das is an independent curator working between the UK and West Africa. Her work explores the intersections of modern and contemporary art, as well as performance. Das holds a PhD in Curating Art and Science: New Methods and Sites of Production from Royal Holloway, University of London, where her research explored live art practices within the context of visual arts. Her curatorial and writing practices privilege embodied knowledge and move fluidly across exhibitions, performance, and critical texts. Between 2020 and 2024, she developed and led curatorial research projects with institutions across Europe and West Africa, including Camden Art Centre, Deptford X Festival, and Galerie Atiss Dakar. Her writing spans exhibition catalogues, academic journals, magazines, and artist monographs, engaging closely with the practices of living and overlooked artists, as well as experimental forms of criticism. Das is currently working on her first book on Black women ceramicists and artists who work with clay.

Adebunmi Gbadebo lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Gbadebo earned her BFA at the School of Visual Arts, New York, and a certification in Creative Place Keeping at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She was a Maxwell and Hanrahan Fellow (2023), a Pew Fellow (2022) and is currently an Artist in Residence at the Clay Studio in Philadelphia.

Gbadebo is a multimedia artist who uses culturally and historically imbued materials to investigate the complex relationships between land, matter, and memory on sites of slavery. Fueled by research and a commitment to archival documentation, her practice confronts the prejudice of the historical record and centers her family’s ancestry in Nigeria and enslavement in America. Using materials such as indigo dye, Black hair collected throughout the diaspora and soil hand-dug from the True Blue plantation grounds in South Carolina, Gbadebo has formed a unique visual vocabulary entirely her own. Her works are heritage, centering ancestral stories that have a right to be told.

Solo exhibitions include Adebunmi Gbadebo: Remains, Claire Oliver Gallery, New York (2023) and Uprooted, New Jersey City University, Jersey City, NJ (2020). Group exhibitions include Ten Thousand Suns, 24th Biennale of Sydney, Artspace, AU (2024); Blues People, curated by Alliyah Allen, Express Newark, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ (2024); Songs for Ritual and Remembrance, Arthur Ross Gallery, University of Pennsylvania, PA (2023) and Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, University of Michigan Museum of Art, and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2022). Public collections include the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the South Carolina State Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Newark Museum of Art. Gbadebo was a Keynote speaker for the American Ceramic Circle annual conference (2023) and has given talks at various educational and cultural institutions including the Museum of the African Diaspora, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Newark Museum of Art. She served as the Community Engagement Apprentice to Architect Nina Cooke John for the Harriet Tubman Monument in Newark, NJ, to replace a statue of Christopher Columbus, and is currently working with students and faculty at Clemson University to create a sculpture that honors Black and enslaved laborers.

Anina Major is a visual artist from the Bahamas. Her decision to establish a  home contrary to the location in which she was born and raised motivates her to investigate  the relationship between self and place as a site of negotiation. By utilizing the vernacular of  craft to reclaim experiences and relocate displaced objects, her practice exists at the intersection of nostalgia, and identity. She holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including the Armory Show 2024 Pommery Prize, the 2023 Joan Mitchell Fellowship, and the EKWC, Centre-of-excellence for ceramics international artist-in-residency. Major’s work has been exhibited in The Bahamas, Europe and across the United States, with a permanent display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. Her work is included in permanent collections of the National Gallery of The Bahamas, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design Museum and Perez Art Museum of Miami, among others. Her work has also been featured in the New York Times, Forbes magazine and published in Phaidon Press Great Women Sculptors.

Lauren Tate Baeza is the Fred and Rita Richman Curator of African Art at the High Museum of Art where she oversees a collection that contains over one thousand objects and is distinct in its representation of ceramics, textiles, and West African fine art and material culture. A scholar of cultural geography and African political history, Baeza is interested in materiality, the spatial distribution of cultural phenomena, and the art of political transitions. For the museum, she spearheads an initiative focused on twentieth century African art and has curated Bruce Onobrakpeya: The Mask and the Cross, Three Decades of Democracy: South African Works on Paper, and Ezrom Legae: Beasts, in addition to leading a major reinstallation of the High’s African art galleries.

Before joining the High, Baeza served as director of exhibitions at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, where she organized sixteen exhibitions and installations engaging the visual arts to address social issues. During her tenure, she partnered with Art for Amnesty, Oculus, ESPN, the City of Atlanta, the State of Georgia, and international consulates to produce exhibitions related to the rights of children, civil and economic rights, and the legacy of racialized violence in the United States. Concurrent with her position at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, she curated presentations from the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection and managed the James Allen and John Littlefield Collection.

In addition to her work in museums and cultural institutions, Baeza previously worked with nongovernmental organizations and policy think tanks focused on efforts in Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, and Malawi. She has also lectured and taught seminars at the Nafasi Academy in Tanzania, Georgia College & State University, Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, Spelman College, Emory University, the University of California, Georgia State University, and California State University.

Baeza holds a Master of Arts in African studies from the University of California, Los Angeles; a Bachelor of Arts in Africana studies and cultural studies from California State University, Northridge; and studied curation at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. She is a contributing editor at Art Papers and serves on the boards of Still Art in Johannesburg and the UCLA African Studies Center. She has been featured on NPR and PBS, as well as in Associated Press News, Smithsonian Magazine, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and various African television and print media.