New Life to an Ancient Art

Ceramics Program clay artist Osa Atoe talks about her origins in ceramics and advocacy for Black legacy in the field. She will lead a workshop at Harvard with David McDonald on April 1-2. 

By Ogechi Obi '26
OFA Staff Blogger

Osa Atoe began working with clay 10 years ago. Before her career as a ceramist, she made zines, wrote songs and toured with a punk rock band. She began working with pottery when she started community classes, which led to a job working at Hands and Clay in New Orleans. There, she traded labor for learning time. Now, in her Florida studio, she is preparing for Africa Adorned: Surface Decoration Techniques Inspired by the Continent, an Office for the Arts Ceramics Program workshop, April 1-2 with David MacDonald, a fellow ceramist working out of a studio in Syracuse.

Atoe is familiar with MacDonald: He is a part of her “clay lineage,” a term Atoe uses to describe the process of connecting herself to elder ceramists and to cultures that have handed down clay-making from generation to generation. She has found comfort in these bonds. “Relationships with older black potters have been so warm and affirming,” she says. Experts in the form, such as MacDonald, help Atoe root her work to a broader body of work, rebuilding the connection that was lost to waves of colonization, globalization and immigration. Working with MacDonald is “a dream come true.”

Their work together, she feels, is related on the elemental level. Both turn to Africa for inspiration. In a visit to his home studio, she noticed books on a wide range of African cultures: architecture, textiles, jewelry, hair. Atoe’s own interest in Africa has led her to learn about traditional methods of pottery in Nigeria, but her studies take inspiration from ancient pottery in Japan, Cyprus and beyond.

Atoe takes the artistry and makes it functional. When she begins a new piece, she starts with a function as the first source of inspiration—a cup, a vase or a serving bowl, a set of pitchers with cups—and then sits at her pottery wheel. She may begin with a sketch or an idea that develops in her thoughts. When the piece comes off the wheel, she begins carving, fine-line pattern work and stamps to create texture. She finishes with glazes she makes herself, using a process she first leaned when she worked at Hands and Clay.

Her artistry also reflects the missing voices in the clay community. “Almost everybody, aside from a handful of a-ceramic cultures have a pottery history,” she explains and adds that African American and African voices are often passed over. “We’re not considered an important part of the story of American ceramics.” Though this may be changing – she noted an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art showcasing the work of enslaved potters from Edgefield South Carolina – she expressed that not enough attention is paid to the contributions of Black potters to the legacy of ceramics.

After 10 years, it feels as though she is “just wrapping up the beginning phase” of her practice. She hopes to have many more years to hone her process, and she finds that she has infinite room to improve and tweak her work. “I’m completely immersed in the process,” she says. And she would love, in 20 years, be a person who “potters of all races, but especially Black potters can look to for inspiration.”

For more information here about the workshop and the Ceramics Program.