Contemporary ceramicist Michelle Erickson draws from historic ceramic techniques to create works that expose the persistence of racism and exploitation in post-colonial countries.

Erickson is a second-generation American and grew up near Colonial Williamsburg, where she studied the clay bodies and glaze formulas of ceramics imported to the American colonies. These works were integral to a vast network of investment, mercantile exchange, and material movement under English Colonial oppression.

Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s genre-defying work, Play Me Home (2021), is a four-channel video with sound and sculptural objects (two horns, a leather-bound script, and seeds) blending narrative fiction and nonfiction. This installation reflects the Philadelphia-based artist’s three-year journey of delving into her family history and funerary traditions in the South.

Produced across the world, bark cloth is an artistic object made from the inner bark of trees and is often a critically important artistic product for the communities that produce it. Bark cloth’s ability to function as both a textile as well as a painted decorative surface extends its importance. However, because Euro-American artists have not historically created artworks from bark, the artform has been understudied and under-collected by Euro-American art museums. It also defies traditional Western categorizations of artistic genre (such as painting, textile, and work on paper).

While living and working in Baltimore in the late 1940s, Matsumi Kanemitsu created a remarkable record of his life to date. This exhibition of 60 early works–largely drawings, as well as rare examples of painting and sculpture–offers an intimate glimpse into Kanemitsu’s past experiences and surreal imagination.

Inspired by family research into her great-great-great-great grandfather Luke Valentine’s service as a free Black militiaman in the American Revolution, Martha Jackson Jarvis has created mixed-media works that imaginatively retrace his journey from Virginia to South Carolina during the Revolutionary War. The result is a tour de force in abstract painting with 13 grandly scaled works on paper, and a focused group of smaller works inspired by the meditative form of the mandala.

Following an open call to artists based in Maryland and neighboring states, Nekisha Durrett of Washington, D.C. and Jackie Milad of Baltimore were selected by a jury to create new works in dialogue with Fred Wilson’s Artemis/Bast (1992). The sculpture joins the body of Artemis, Greek goddess of the hunt, and the head of Bast (also known as Bastet), the more ancient Egyptian cat goddess. The black feline head sits atop the white plaster body, asserting Africa as a vital source of knowledge across the ancient world.