Anina Major

Anina Major (born 1981 in Nassau, The Bahamas) is a Bahamian visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice encompasses ceramics, sculpture, installation, video, performance, and mixed media. Best known for transforming traditional Bahamian straw-plaiting techniques into monumental woven-clay forms, Major investigates the relationship between self and place, particularly the emotional negotiations involved in migration, displacement, cultural inheritance, and establishing a home away from one’s birthplace. Her practice exists at the intersection of nostalgia and identity, using craft traditions to reclaim experiences, preserve histories, and relocate cultural objects that have been displaced or undervalued.  Major’s signature ceramic language grows from the Bahamian tradition of straw plaiting, a skill she encountered through her grandmother, who produced woven goods for the tourist marketplace. The practice itself carries deeper histories: techniques of weaving and plaiting in The Bahamas developed partly through West African knowledge carried across the Atlantic by enslaved Africans. Major recreates these forms in clay, replacing organic fibers that eventually deteriorate with fired earth intended to survive. Through this material translation, basketry becomes an archive of ancestry, labor, migration, and cultural persistence.  Major earned a BS in Graphic Design from Drexel University in 2003 and an MFA in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2017. Her work has been presented across The Bahamas, the United States, and Europe and is held by institutions including the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, RISD Museum, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, and Pérez Art Museum Miami. Her honors include a 2026 United States Artists Fellowship, selection as a 2025 LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize finalist, the 2024 Armory Show Pommery Prize, the inaugural Future Perfect Prize, and a 2023 Joan Mitchell Fellowship. Her forthcoming major museum exhibition, Anina Major: The Sacred Mangrove, opens at Pérez Art Museum Miami on October 1, 2026.