Between Starshine and Clay: Ceramics Across Diaspora, Land, and Lineage

About the Exhibition Clay contains memories. It holds the impression of hands, the memory of fire, and the knowledge passed from one generation to the next without always being written down. Between Starshine and Clay: Ceramics Across Diaspora, Land, and Lineage opens the 2027 season at the Art & History Museums of Maitland with a major exhibition exploring the enduring legacy of African and African American ceramics through contemporary studio practice. Rooted in themes of diaspora, memory, land, and shared cultural tradition, the exhibition brings together the work of artist Osa Atoe and the Kaabo Clay Collective in a conversation that moves across continents, centuries, and communities. Atoe’s work begins with the ground beneath her feet. Her functional vessels and sculptural forms are shaped from locally sourced Florida clay, drawing equally from the state’s landscape and from traditional Nigerian water vessel forms. These are objects made for communal use, to be poured from, passed around a table, and integrated into the rhythms of everyday life. In honoring pottery as a collective cultural practice, Atoe connects the contemporary studio to a far longer arc of African craftsmanship and regional identity, insisting that beauty and utility have never needed to be separate. The Kaabo Clay Collective extends that arc across generations. This section of the exhibition brings together influential elder Black ceramic artists whose contributions have shaped the field, including Florida-based ceramicists Yvonne Tucker and David Mack, alongside examples of Afro-Native colonoware that trace the intertwined ceramic histories of African and Indigenous peoples in the American South. In gathering these voices and forms together, the exhibition acknowledges that artistic lineage is not only inherited, but also actively tended. Between Starshine and Clay offers a significant contribution to Florida’s cultural landscape and to the broader history of Black ceramics in the United States, providing a reminder that the knowledge carried in clay is older, and more resilient, than any single tradition.