After the Island: Ornament and Ceramic Practice in the Jamaican Diaspora

After the Island: Ornament and Ceramic Practice in the Jamaican Diaspora, is on view at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), 685 Mission Street, San Francisco, from September 30, 2026 through May 30, 2027. The exhibition brings together the work of PJ Anderson, Jacqueline Bishop, and Sharon Norwood to investigate contemporary ceramic practices shaped by Caribbean history and the movement of people, objects, traditions, and memories across geographic and generational boundaries. Each artist approaches Jamaica from a different position within the diaspora—through lived memory, inherited history, or ancestral connection reconstructed over time. Material history is central to the exhibition. Porcelain and other ceramic forms carry complicated histories: European porcelain became associated with refinement, status, and imperial power, while ceramic traditions across Africa have long carried social identity, sacred knowledge, community histories, and ancestral presence. Within the Caribbean, these traditions encountered one another under the conditions of colonialism and developed into hybrid visual languages shaped by survival, adaptation, and invention. After the Island examines how contemporary artists continue to work within and against these histories, transforming surfaces and vessels into sites of remembrance and cultural assertion. The three artists approach these questions through distinct practices. PJ Anderson works with hand-built, smoke-fired ceramics and fiber, drawing upon ceramic traditions from Africa and the Americas and exploring silhouette, negative space, surface, and construction. Jacqueline Bishop, a Jamaican-born writer and visual artist, uses decorated bone china and mixed-media ceramic works to confront the histories of slavery and colonialism concealed beneath objects associated with domestic beauty and refinement. Sharon Norwood, also Jamaican-born, works across ceramics, drawing, found objects, and installation, frequently using the curly line as a reference to Afro-textured hair and the Black body while examining race, labor, cultural memory, and systems of representation. The exhibition emerges from a curatorial partnership between the Museum of the African Diaspora, Black Artists’ Network in Dialogue (Toronto), and the Gardiner Museum (Toronto). The organizations developed concurrent exhibitions considering how artists of Caribbean descent use ceramics to explore labor, the body, groundedness, migration, and cultural continuity. Rather than defining the Caribbean solely as a fixed geographic region, the project understands it as a network of relationships extending across borders and generations. Through vessels, sculptural installations, decorated surfaces, and other material forms, After the Island positions clay and ornament as archives through which diasporic histories can be preserved, questioned, and remade.