Crocker Art Museum opens new exhibit celebrating Black artists. Here’s what’s being featured

A colorful array of terracotta, porcelain and other ceramics is currently on display at the Crocker Art Museum, part of a recently-opened exhibition celebrating Black artists.

But that was only the latest stage in an exhibition several years in the making.

“A Gathering: Works from ‘Contemporary Black American Ceramic Artists’” opened May 7 at the Crocker, following a debut show last year at Minneapolis’s Northern Clay Center. That show, in turn, grew from a 256-page book co-authored by exhibition curators Chotsani Elaine Dean and donald a clark that has been in the works since 2019.

clark, who stylizes his name in lower case, said the reason to do the book – which is for sale for $60 in Crocker’s gift shop, with discounts for museum members – was to get its artists’ work in front of as many people as possible. Getting shows in Minneapolis and now Sacramento, he added, meant even more people would see it.

“It is a collection, gathering of rather wonderful work by a group of people and it’s work that doesn’t necessarily get seen,” clark said. “And it’s unlikely that that body of work would typically end up in a museum setting.”

What the exhibition consists of

Geographically, this show is diverse, representing ceramic artists from across the United States. It also represents a wide range of professional experience levels.

The exhibition includes “sour, hot, bitter, and sweet,” a ceremonial piece consisting of four porcelain plates atop a block of cedar. The piece’s creator, 47-year-old Tacoma-based artist Kristina Batiste said the piece is based on a common ritual, a tasting of the elements that happens at Black weddings in both the United States and Africa.

“I just wanted to do something that had some Black joy in it,” said Batiste who began making work seven years ago after taking a community college course.

Others in the exhibition have been at their craft longer, such as Adero Willard, an academic who counts more than 25 years of artistic experience. Willard, who is currently based in New York but will begin teaching a ceramics course this fall at California State University, Sacramento, contributed a 2019 piece for the exhibition, “Entangle #2.”

“I love being a part of the community of Black ceramics artists and to be recognized for what I feel is a long time in the field,” Willard said.

In all, the show features 35 works. The show will run through Aug. 20 at the Crocker, whereupon it will head to Springfield, Massachusetts, where clark lives, for a six-month run at local venues.

Some works from the show’s run in Minneapolis aren’t at the Crocker, with clark saying some artists had works they’ve sold. Dean and clark’s book also features artists not in the Crocker exhibition, such as Sacramento native Akinsanya Kambon who had a show at the Crocker from 2020-21 and still has work elsewhere in the museum.

A changing climate

The initial run of Dean and clark’s show at the Northern Clay Center came just over two years after the murder of George Floyd by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Floyd’s murder touched off national protests and spurred a societal reckoning, including in the artistic world.

Northern Clay Center Deputy Director Tippy Maurant said one of her staff lives just three blocks from where Chauvin murdered Floyd. Maurant also noted that her center is in the city’s third police precinct, where protesters burned down a police station in the tumultuous days that followed Floyd’s death.

But the public response to Floyd’s murder also helped elevate work the center had been doing around diverse representation, inclusivity and removing barriers to access. “All of a sudden, we had buy-in from the whole world,” Maurant said. “And that made it so much easier to talk about it out loud.”

Dean, who moved to Minneapolis about three months after Floyd’s murder to teach at University of Minnesota, has mixed feelings on what his death has catalyzed in the artistic world. “You don’t want every single idea or artistic expression to only be related to that,” Dean said.

Still, the shift in the artistic world and broadening of opportunities for Black makers has been undeniable. Batiste said the new climate is reminiscent of the Black arts movement of the 1960s and ‘70s. “It feels like that, again, that there is this space where we’re being seen… in a way that we weren’t seen before,” Batiste said.

The aftermath of Floyd’s death also helped generate some controversy around clark and Dean’s book and exhibition. clark, a 79-year-old white man, was originally going to write the book on his own. Dean, a 47-year-old Black woman, joined the project after 12 people signed a petition in 2020.

In a booklet for the show’s run at the Northern Clay Center, clark wrote that the main concern presented in the petition “was that as a white man, I couldn’t record the powerful truth narratives of the Black community.” clark told the Sacramento Bee he appreciated the criticism because it led to Dean’s involvement in the book, which improved it.

Maurant’s glad the book came about.

“This book is a watershed moment in terms of discussing Black ceramic artists who are contemporary makers,” Maurant said. “It just didn’t exist before.”

Why this exhibition is happening in Sacramento

Just as it took multiple years for clark and Dean to recruit artists to contribute to their book and show, it’s had a long road to the Crocker.

clark initially reached out to a curator who no longer works at the museum hoping to get in contact with Kambon. The project was initially just going to be the book, though the curator told clark that if there was an exhibit, the Crocker might want it.

After the curator had moved on, Scott Shields – the Crocker’s Ted and Melza Barr chief curator and associate director – found the email, continued the conversation and echoed the previous interest to clark. “I basically said, ‘If it turns into a show, could we consider taking it in Sacramento?’” Shields said.

Through the course of their conversations, clark, a former gallerist, agreed to donate a sculpture of a horse from his personal collection by South Carolina artist Russell Biles to the Crocker.

Discussions to exhibit “A Gathering” locally also progressed, being far along by the time Rachel Gotlieb arrived in July 2021 to serve as the Crocker’s Ruth Rippon curator of ceramics. “Because we’re so committed to contemporary ceramics, this was a no-brainer,” Gotlieb said.

Katherine Bardis-Miry, a Crocker board member said she had gone to see the exhibition and thought it was phenomenal. “The Crocker always does a really great job of bringing in new artists and thought-provoking exhibitions,” Bardis-Miry said.

Shields is pleased as well at what discussions with clark led to.

“It was just sort of a conception when we first started to talk about it,” Shields said. “So to see it as reality is great.”

Dean said she’s hopeful the exhibition can help show the public what artists do, that “there are people who are thinking deeply about life, philosophical, the sociological, historical, all of it. And that they have an equal and valuable place in our world.”

If you go…

What: An artist workshop and conversation with Chotsani Elaine Dean

When: Workshop is 1-4 p.m. June 10; conversation at 11 a.m. June 11.

Where: Crocker Art Museum

Cost: $125 member/$155 nonmember for workshop; $12 member/$20 nonmember for conversation

Tickets: crockerart.org