Walking Through the World, With My Heart in My Hands
2020-06-27 13:00 - 14:00 (America/New_York) | Clay Art Center, 40 Beech Street, Port Chester, NY, United States
Clay Art Center

Behold
2021-10-02 10:00 - 2022-01-31 17:00 | Welancora Gallery, 33 Herkimer Street, Brooklyn, NY, 11216, United States
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Welancora Gallery is proud to present BEHOLD, featuring work by Oasa DuVerney, Sana Musasama, Komikka Patton, Roberto Visani and Chris Watts from October 2, 2021 – January 31, 2022. Through personal and collective memories and lived experiences, the exhibition examines alternative ways to interrogate notions of Blackness through work that is either devoid of the figure or, where the figure is present, the gaze is cued away from the body.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Oasa DuVerney signals elements from nature, including waves, snakes and mountains to explore the ways in which Black power and Black bodies exist in contemporary society. Most of DuVerney’s work is social and political commentary that relates to her social status as a
woman of color and as a working-class person. Her works are mainly figurative drawings, specifically graphite on paper. DuVerney received her B.F.A from the Fashion Institute of Technology, and her M.F.A from Hunter College. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Selected exhibitions, residencies and media include: BLACK POWER WAVE, BRIC, Brooklyn, NY (2019); 2019 Women To Watch, NMWA (2019); TV Guide Spring/Break Art Show, United Nations Plaza NYC (2019); Something To Say, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn NY (2018); The Window and the Breaking of the Window, Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC (2016); The Brooklyn Biennial II, BRIC, Brooklyn, NY (2016); Through A Glass Darkly, Postmasters Gallery, NYC (2012); Rush Philanthropic Foundation Artist Residency (2016), Smack Mellon Studio Artist Residency (2014-2015); LMCC Workspace Residency (2012-2013); Brooklyn Foundation Grant (2016); The Guardian UK, UK (2019), The Independent, UK (2016), Hyperallergic (2015, 2016), The Guardian UK,UK (2015), Palestine News Network (2013), and The New York Times (2012, 2011).
Sana Musasama is an African-American ceramic and mixed-media artist based in New York City. Her work touches on themes related to tribal adornment practices in various indigenous cultures, and the safety of women. In We were there, 1993 from her Maple Trees series, Musasama draws inspiration from the Maple Tree Movement, which was started in the 1790s by a group of abolitionists. The group advocated ending the need for slave labor to fuel the sugar cane industry on West Indian sugar plantations, by replacing it with syrup from maple trees. Made using various clay bodies that resemble trees with organic and bodily extensions of stone, beads and moss, the work is scaled to the human body ranging in size from 3.5 to over 5 feet.

Survival Tools for the Age of Ultra Anxiety
2021-11-04 08:00 - 2021-11-28 17:00 | The Plaxall Gallery, 5-25 46th Avenue, Queens, NY, 11101, United States

(MOSTLY) WOMEN (MOSTLY) ABSTRACT PT. II
2023-09-08 - 2023-10-14 | Eric Firestone Gallery, 40 Great Jones Street, New York, NY, 10012, United States
Eric Firestone Gallery is pleased to announce the second iteration of (Mostly) Women (Mostly) Abstract, a sweeping two-part exhibition across its East Hampton and New York City locations with a cross-generational group of artists. The exhibition focuses on abstraction and represents aesthetic conversations over time between contemporary artists and represented gallery artists and estates.
(Mostly) Women (Mostly) Abstract shows how content is embedded in abstraction. The work on view reflects multiculturalism, daily life, and domesticity, and employs references to sound, language, and place. The exhibition showcases artists who haven’t always operated in the center of the art world, but who charted a deeply personal path, and utilized experimental techniques, materials, and processes.
In broad terms, the exhibition considers the condition of “otherness” as manifest in abstraction, in terms of ethnicity, race, gender, and sexual orientation. The exhibition reflects Eric Firestone Gallery’s central mission: to examine the ever-expanding canon of Post-War painting and sculpture in New York.

Sana Musasama: Returning to Ourselves
2024-02-23 08:00 - 2024-04-28 17:00 | Everson Museum of Art, 401 Harrison Street, Syracuse, NY, 13202, United States
Sana Musasama is a ceramic artist based in Queens, New York. Musasama received her BA from City College of New York in 1973 and
Returning to Ourselves 2024
her MFA from Alfred University in 1988. She began traveling in the 1970s as a way to recover her own identity and cultural place. Clay was the geographical catalyst that brought her first to West Africa, where she studied pottery with the Mende People in Sierra Leone (1974-75). She later ventured to Japan, China, South America, and Cambodia. She has expanded her interests to tribal adornment practices in various Indigenous cultures. She is challenged by the concerns surrounding the safety of women, specifically the rituals involving rites of passage, female chastity and the “purification” of the female body.

Raised Earth
2025-09-05 08:00 - 2025-10-18 17:00 | Eric Firestone Gallery, 40 Great Jones Street, New York, NY, 10012, United States
Raised Earth
Eric Firestone Gallery is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition of the internationally recognized ceramic artist Sana Musasama. The exhibition will be a dynamic installation of Musasama’s formative House series: vertically stacked ceramic sculptures, like abstracted small-scale temples, exploring multicultural connections to home and community. The work is inspired by the artist’s time living in adobe houses in West Africa in the mid-1970s, her recurrent travel to Cambodia, and time spent in the American West.
House Series #15, 2023ceramic
The slab-formed ceramics are multi-planar, touched and textured structures with deep color areas and repeated oval shapes that can be read variously as eyes, leaves, or vaginal forms. They are etched with intricate sgraffito marks suggesting body adornment, weavings, flora, and fauna. Elements extend from the planes: rings suggesting jewelry and grids like open baskets or seed pods. In her House series, Musasama uses both earthenware and stoneware and accomplishes her vivid colors through various ceramic glazes, often finishing her works with salt or soda firing to create exquisite surfaces that contrast with the red-brown clay she prefers.
Musasama first began her House series in the late 1970s, and they were the subject of a 1985 exhibition at the Studio Museum, following her 1983–84 residency with the museum. She decided to revisit these works 45 years later, creating what she called “siblings” to the original works in response to the isolation of 2020. Over the past two years, the artist has worked across the globe to create about twenty significant new House sculptures. This will be the first time work from the two periods are joined into a solo, survey exhibition.

Re-Union: Syd Carpenter, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Judy Moonelis, Sana Musasama, and Winnie Owens Hart
2026-01-14 08:00 - 2026-03-29 17:00 | Frances M. Maguire Art Museum, 50 Lapsley Lane, Merion, PA, 19066, United States
“Re-Union” brings together the works of Syd Carpenter, Winnie Owens Hart, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Judy Moonelis, and Sana Musasama. Each of these artists played a significant role in shaping American art–and the field of ceramics–during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Syd Carpenter’s large-scale clay and metal works investigate the complex history of African Americans and farming, from slavery to the present day. Winnie Owens Hart’s pioneering use of traditional African ceramic techniques and forms engage with contemporary issues concerning race, identity, and gender. Martha Jackson Jarvis’s monumental mixed media pieces explore African American and Native American spirituality, ecological concerns, and histories. Judy Moonelis’s intricate multimedia installations probe the intersections of art and science, drawing inspiration from neuroscience and anatomy and relating the human body to a variety of architectural contexts. Sana Musasama’s constructions of glass, organic materials, and clay are rooted in her global activist and educational endeavors in women’s/human rights.

Clay Has Memory: Generational Knowledge from Africa
2026-07-01 10:00 - 2027-07-01 17:00 | Princeton University Art Museum, 63 College Rd W, Princeton, NJ, 08540, United States
Organized by Assistant Curator of African Art, Perrin Lathrop, the exhibit “Clay Has Memory” will be on view in the new PUAM’s first floor welcome gallery from July 2026-July 2027. It will trouble the boundaries between art and craft, centering the contributions of Black artists, especially Black women, and inviting inquiry into the hierarchies that have historically relegated their creative labor to the realm of the anonymous and the undervalued. This grant will provide support for the exhibition as well as interdisciplinary opportunities and hands-on, pedagogy-driven workshops for faculty across arts and sciences.
