The Gardiner Museum, the Black Artists’ Networks in Dialogue (BAND), and the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) present a landmark curatorial partnership exploring contemporary ceramic practices rooted in Caribbean histories, memory, and cultural transformation.

Presented across two exhibitions and two cities—Toronto and San Francisco—this collaboration brings together artists whose work examines migration, ornament, labour, ancestry, and the enduring impact of Caribbean cultural traditions across generations and geographies.

At the Gardiner Museum, After the Island: Caribbean Canadian Ceramics considers how artists of the Caribbean diaspora are embracing the medium of ceramics to explore themes of knowledge transfer and the liberatory potential of the clandestine. Through existing and newly commissioned works by Caribbean Canadian artists PJ Anderson, Eddy Firmin, Manual Mathieu, and Sharon Norwood, the exhibition approaches questions of identity, belonging, memory, and cultural continuity through the language of clay.

At MoAD, After the Island: Ornament and Ceramic Practice in the Jamaican Diaspora focuses on artists whose practices engage Jamaica as memory, inheritance, orientation, and cultural touchstone. The exhibition examines how ornament functions as a carrier of history, labour, ancestral knowledge, and relation across time and distance.

Together, After the Island: Caribbean Canadian Ceramics and After the Island: Ornament and Ceramic Practice in the Jamaican Diaspora offer a timely exploration of migration, memory, and cultural continuity, demonstrating how artists working with clay continue to create new forms of relation between past and present, homeland and diaspora, history and imagination.

Throughout both presentations, vessels, decorative forms, sculptural installations, and ceramic surfaces become sites where histories are preserved, challenged, reimagined, and carried forward.

Image: Eddy Firmin, Sans signe, 2023, Ceramic, wood, fabric, straw, Variable dimensions. Photo: Michael Patten