JACQUELINE BISHOP in: After the Island: Ornament and Ceramic Practice in the Jamaican Diaspora

Curated by Key Jo Lee

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.

FEATURED ARTWORK

Jacqueline Bishop, “A Way Outa No Way – Charleston Ladies (set of 15)”, 2026

Jacqueline Bishop, “Song of The Banana Man (set of 12)”, 2026