Join us for an Artist Talk with the three artists from After the Island: Ornament and Ceramic Practice in the Jamaican Diaspora – PJ Anderson, Jacqueline Bishop and Sharon Norwood, in conversation with Curator Key Jo Lee.

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The exhibition considers how culture is carried across migration and remade through distance. Each artist approaches Jamaica from a different point along the
diasporic continuum: through lived memory, inherited history, or an ancestral connection reconstructed across generations. Their works reveal ornament as a living language, capable of holding what has been remembered, fragmented, lost, and newly imagined.

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About the Artists

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PJ ANDERSON

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PJ Anderson is a ceramic artist from Thompson, Manitoba, Canada, currently residing in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. PJ has shown Nationally across Canada and internationally, as Resident Artist at the University of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa, where she had previously visited as a Zulu ceramics researcher, China as a finalist in the International Ceramic Magazine Editors Associations (ICMEA) emerging artist competition, the United States. She teaches at the Winnipeg Art Gallery Studio Program and is currently a graduate candidate at the University of Manitoba and Director at Large for NCECA.

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JACQUELINE BISHOP

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Jacqueline Bishop (b. 1971, Kingston, Jamaica) 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 Foundation Fellow in France; 2008-2009 Fulbright Fellow in Morocco; and 2009-2010 UNESCO/Fulbright Fellow in Paris. Bishop has received several awards, including: the OCM Bocas Award for her book “The Gymnast & Other Positions”, The Canute A. Brodhurst Prize for short story writing, The Arthur Schomburg Award for Excellence in the Humanities from New York University, A James Michener Creative Writing Fellowship, as well as several awards from the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission.

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Jacqueline’s recent ceramic work consists of brightly colored bone China plates used symbolically in Caribbean homes and explores how they hid the violent legacy of slavery and colonialism in the Atlantic world.

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SHARON NORWOOD

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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 how systems of power shape cultural memory and ways of seeing. A recurring motif in her practice is the curly line, which functions both as a formal gesture and a conceptual reference to Afro-textured hair and the Black body.

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Norwood holds a BFA from the University of South Florida and an MFA in Studio Art from Florida State University. Her work has been presented in exhibitions, installations, and public programs across Canada, the United States, Jamaica, and Germany. She has participated in residencies, research programs, and visiting artist initiatives at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Vermont Studio Center, Alfred University, and the Château de La Napoule Art Foundation.

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KEY JO LEE

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Key Jo Lee is Chief of Curatorial Affairs & Public Programs at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), where she thinks with artists about Blackness, perception, cosmology, interior life, and the futures museums rarely know how to hold. With more than a decade in the field, her work lives at the intersection of curating, theory, and institution-building, asking how exhibitions do intellectual work and how care can be designed, not just declared.

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Her recent projects include UNBOUND: Art, Blackness & the Universe and Liberatory Living: Protective Interiors and Radical Black Joy. Previously, she was Associate Curator of American Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. She is the author of Perceptual Drift: Black Art and an Ethics of Looking, has written for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and holds dual MA and MPhil degrees in History of Art and African American Studies from Yale University.

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