Visual Voices: Truth Narratives

Visual Voices: Truth Narratives is a NCECA ANNUAL EXHIBITION. Guest curator Winnie Owens-Hart has invited artists Syd Carpenter, Roberto Lugo, Sana Musasama, Reginald Pointer, and Janathel Shaw to frame the curatorial concerns of Visual Voices: Truth Narratives. The 35 selected ceramic artists create powerful works that speak in a variety of visual volumes that touch on personal and global issues and emotions. Their narratives, whether literal or abstract, acknowledge that intolerances spawn racial, religious, class, and gender biases in every part of the world. The sense of interconnectedness created by modern media has transformed what was once an ancestral community to now a global community.

Our stories, re-told in clay, are borderless. Historically, the narrative ceramic object has engaged with the retelling of events through visual imagery codification. Clay works dating back thousands of years have enabled archaeologists to theorize on ceremonial, spiritual, and utilitarian societal markers that document the social and cultural contexts of their makers’ communities. Makers have continued the creation of narrative works using clay. Contemporary narrative ceramic artists, compared to their historical counterparts, are visually bombarded through media systems. Some work is created based solely on the artist’s personal experiences while others are influenced by what they see through the media; many today are shaped by both.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website