Oral History Project
This project seeks to document Black women in contemporary ceramics through oral history. It explores craft, identity, and the Black home as sites of memory, aesthetics, care, and resistance, bridging gaps in archives, discourse, and taste shaped by Black women in art, design, and culture.
Burnished Earth: The Black Women’s Archive
Burnished Earth: The Black Women’s Archive is a multidisciplinary exhibition and oral history project uplifting the work of contemporary Black women ceramicists. Rooted in storytelling, ancestral memory, and material culture, the project reclaims ceramics as a historically overlooked and gendered medium. Through installations, interviews, and archival engagement, the exhibition positions clay as a vessel of Black feminist knowledge and cultural transmission, challenging Eurocentric art hierarchies and reimagining the archive as a living, communal, and feminine space.
This exhibition critically uplifts Black women working in clay, highlighting how their practices challenge colonial hierarchies between craft and fine art. Through oral histories, archival engagement, and diasporic aesthetics, it repositions the white cube as a site of resistance and storytelling. The work explores the code-switching, autonomy, and ancestral intelligence embedded in clay traditions, where vessels, figures, and motifs serve as embodiments of identity and spirit. By presenting these practices in dialogue with Weeksville’s legacy, the exhibition invites viewers to reflect on the cultural labor of Black women and the politics of making, memory, and care.
Three Parts to the Project
Writing and Research
Documenting Black women in contemporary ceramics through research techniques in an oral history explores craft, identity, and the Black home as sites of memory, aesthetics, care, and resistance, bridging gaps in discourse around fine art shaped by Black women in craft, design, and culture.
-
Known for her black-on-black pottery, a distinct style she and her husband, Julian Martinez, developed. She learned pottery from her family and taught it to future generations. Her work is featured in the museum's collection.
A contemporary artist who works in the tradition of hand-coiling, influenced by Margaret Tafoya.
A ceramicist and printmaker who, along with Tony Hill, founded a successful ceramics studio in Los Angeles.
Other notable Black ceramicists:
The Clay Art Center has highlighted artists like Syd Carpenter, Vinnie Bagwell, Rich Brown, and others, showcasing the diverse talents within the Black ceramic community.
While not solely a ceramicist, Leigh's work often incorporates ceramics and explores themes of Black women's misrepresentation in art, drawing on her studies of Nigerian pottery.
An influential African ceramicist whose work is known for its local notoriety, even making vessels for the emir of the Abuja Emirate.
An African artist whose ceramics often depict figurative forms and use crackled red and black surfaces to convey a sense of world weariness.
-
-
-
Oral History + Interviews
Where did your arts education come from?
Where does your culture and personal identity show in your work?
How has abstraction and figuration influenced your work?
-
Ceramic Studios, collections, studio spaces, and sites of artist interviews and present oral hsitory
-
Those working in precedent spaces
solo exhibitions
surveys across gender and race
articles and published critique
-
U.S. and abroad
By looking internally into the U.S. treatment of craft from sources of some of the first ceramic guilds started and operated by formally enslaved, we start to uncover the connections to West African motifs to current work see the “Hear Me Now…” exhibition at the MET
-
Bridging the gap between the archive and living histories we are exploring the impact and legacy of artists in one of the oldest mediums that has had measurable evolution in technology, but how the creation and personal connection still remain in it’s antiquified practices
Publication + Community Building
Resulting in an online archive, exhibition + catalog
This work forces us to investigate how the contributions of Black women to contemporary art have evolved.
Enshrining seminal exhibitions, monumental strides to elevate the medium, and creating discourse around the fine quality of the craft arts
Ceramics has long been gendered, often relegated to craft rather than fine art due to its domestic associations and decorative traditions, which women have played a significant role in shaping. Through this research, I aim to challenge these limitations, highlighting how Black women in ceramics are redefining the medium, pushing conceptual boundaries, and expanding its impact beyond traditional narratives.
Burnished Earth: The Black Women’s Archive
Burnished Earth is a research-driven oral history project and podcast centering the stories, craft, and cultural legacies of Black women ceramicists. Hosted by art historian and emerging ceramicist theurbnsloth, the series explores the politics of visibility, the power of clay as memory, and the labor of Black women artists shaping the past, present, and future of material culture.
Each episode offers a blend of storytelling, critical reflection, and interviews with artists, researchers, and cultural workers whose practices challenge traditional art world hierarchies. With a focus on oral history, feminist theory, and embodied research, Burnished Earth brings the archive to life — honoring the hands, histories, and voices too often left out of dominant narratives.
Whether you're an artist, researcher, student, or curious listener, this podcast is an invitation to slow down, listen deeply, and imagine new ways of making, remembering, and preserving.
Approach to the research
archives, artists, artwork + collections
-
Kaboo Collective and Directory (National)
The Clay Studio (Philly)
Ceramic Meltdown (New Jersey)
-
-
-
Goals of the Project
-
In a perfect world it’s everyone, but the project is for the young Black women with an idea, the young Black boys expressing themselves, for the professors that encourage exploration, for the aunties that don’t know what their niece is researching but think it’s amazing to have a young person with passion around, and for the friends always eager to read papers and attend talks. For the art lovers and lovers of art, this project is for you
-
Reader: A generated archive of living ceramic artists drawing connections through culture, ancestral heritage, region, community, and mastery of craft. Oral histories, investigations, and essays add color to the exhibition as being a site for discourse and further pursuit
Catalog: serving the purpose of more critical work of how the pace was curated and elevated the site and exhibition. Use of the space, resources, and elevating a few of the stories in the reader in a survey way brings accessibility into a book that may live on a coffee table, sit in a classroom, and outside of my collection of books. These women deserve to have their names alongside the women that inspired them and to have their work documented as a contributing element to the evolution of Black culture, visual culture, and pedagogy
-
Youth: Workshops with art are crucial to spatial and motor skill development. Teaching this coordination and expressive thinking develops well-rounded people and the ability to be effective in life, and passionate about their interests
polymer clay
air dry clay
Partnerships with ceramic studios for tours and demonstrations
Adult: programming is a mixture of talks, lectures, and tours. This is a good space for community feedback beyond engaging with younger generations on how they see themselves in art. This space is often from a place of new experiences or a reevaluation of preconceived notions of art or ceramics- adults live with homeware, but we can discuss
Collections and Archives
Art collecting and membership spaces
Art fairs and international platforms for the medium
Relationships with artists
Mixed Audience Heavily focused on demonstrations and tours, this is an open forum for all age groups with foundational knowledge or none at all to gain a deeper understanding of how ceramics impact how they see and design their space and home, from things made and collected
