Anina Major: The Sacred Mangrove

Anina Major: The Sacred Mangrove presents Bahamian artist Anina Major’s most significant institutional exhibition in the United States to date. Working across ceramics, sculpture, and installation, Major examines relationships between self and place through craft traditions, oral histories, material culture, and the movement of knowledge across generations. Her practice is particularly rooted in Bahamian palm-leaf plaiting, which she translates into clay by constructing woven forms strand by strand. This transformation from organic fiber into fired ceramic gives permanence to a practice traditionally made from ephemeral materials while questioning distinctions between craft and fine art. Major’s relationship to weaving is deeply personal. Her grandmother, Saphora Newbold, was a Bahamian straw weaver whose palm-leaf hats, dolls, and bags helped support the family and contributed to the education of Major and her mother. Major later relearned the tradition and began reconstructing its forms in clay, preserving the knowledge and physical labor of weaving while examining the complicated relationship between cultural heritage, economic survival, and the Bahamas’ tourism industry. The mangrove provides the exhibition with both its title and its central metaphor. Mangrove ecosystems protect Caribbean shorelines while depending on human stewardship for their own survival. Major extends this reciprocal relationship into an exploration of care, resilience, ancestry, and responsibility. Installed in PAMM’s waterfront gallery overlooking Biscayne Bay, the exhibition also places these questions within Miami’s own Caribbean context, connecting histories of tourism, migration, labor, cultural memory, and belonging across the region.