Loading…
Join us for our annual San Francisco/ Bay Area Black Art week from Wednesday September 30th - Sunday October 4th, 2026!
← Back to schedule
After the Island: Ornament and Ceramic Practice
Friday October 2, 2026 11:00am - 5:00pm PDT
Museum of the African Diaspora @ 685 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94105, USA
Reserve Your Spot
New ceramic work by Sharon Norwood, Jacqueline Bishop, and PJ Anderson, organized in partnership with the Gardiner Museum, on view September 30, 2026 through May 30, 2027.

For more than a century, decoration was dismissed as surface, the opposite of substance. After the Island argues otherwise. Across West African, Caribbean, and Indigenous traditions, ornament has functioned as infrastructure: a way of carrying memory, spiritual knowledge, and historical truth through exactly the kinds of rupture, migration, and enforced silence that were designed to erase them. The exhibition’s three artists each work from a different relationship to Jamaica and to diaspora, ranging from lived childhood memory to ancestral distance, and the exhibition holds those differences rather than resolving them into a single narrative.

Sharon Norwood inscribes the curly line, her signature mark for the Black body, into vintage china and architectural brick, work that runs from colonial tea services to the hand-formed bricks of Savannah’s enslaved laborers. Jacqueline Bishop’s newly commissioned ceramic chargers, the Banana Man series and Way Out of No Way, center the Jamaican banana worker and the market woman, two figures Bishop calls the Americas, on the very decorative surfaces once used to erase them.

PJ Anderson’s woven vessels and clay figures fuse coiled clay with handwoven paper and fiber, drawing on coiling and burnishing traditions she studied directly with ceramic practitioners in South Africa and the American Southwest, and on her own Red River Métis and Afro-Jamaican heritage.

After the Island is organized in partnership with the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, North America’s only museum dedicated exclusively to ceramic art, which reopened in late 2025 with a major new permanent gallery devoted to Indigenous ceramics. The partnership brings together two institutions independently invested, in this same moment, in exactly the kind of work this exhibition centers.
Arts & Culture Leaders
avatar for Key Jo Lee

Key Jo Lee

Chief of Curatorial Affairs & Public Programs, Museum of the African Diaspora
Key Jo Lee is chief of curatorial affairs and public programs at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco. In this role, Lee oversees the strategic direction for the museum’s exhibitions and programs; leads globally on identifying and promoting emerging artists... Read More →
Artists
avatar for Jacqueline Bishop

Jacqueline Bishop

Artist
b. 1971, Kingston, Jamaica
lives and works in New York, NY

Jacqueline Bishop is an accomplished writer, academic, and visual artist with exhibitions in Belgium, Morocco, Italy, Cape Verde, Niger, USA, and Jamaica. In addition to her role as Clinical Full Professor at New York University, Jacqueline Bishop was a 2020 Dora Maar/Brown Founda... Read More →
avatar for PJ Anderson

PJ Anderson

Artist
PJ Anderson is Jamaican Canadian/Red River Métis Artist from Thompson, Manitoba, Canada. She has shown internationally, as Resident Artist at the University of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa, China as a finalist in the International Ceramic Magazine Editors Associations (ICMEA) emerging... Read More →
avatar for Sharon Norwood

Sharon Norwood

Artist
Sharon Norwood is a Jamaican-born interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans ceramics, drawing, found objects, and installation. Through material exploration and process-based experimentation, her work engages with race, labour, identity, and historical narratives, often examining... Read More →
Friday October 2, 2026 11:00am - 5:00pm PDT
Museum of the African Diaspora
  Exhibition

Sign up or log in to save this to your schedule, view media, leave feedback and see who's attending!

Tweet Share

Get help with the event

Contact event planner Event login
View support guides Find upcoming events
Create an event you'd love to attend!
Explore why organizers choose Sched • Success stories
Event App • Event scheduling • Event registration • Event ticketing • Sched forms • Call for papers • Badges • Conferences
© 2026. SCHED LLC - All rights reserved - Helping events since 2008
Event Planning App • Privacy • Terms
Share Modal

Share this link via

Or copy link