5 Standout Shows to See at Small Galleries This October https://ift.tt/coX2jyb

Chase, 2026
Hisham Sharif
Ayyam Gallery

In this monthly roundup, we spotlight five stellar exhibitions at small and rising galleries.

Chuma Adam and Siyabonga Fani

“Catching”

99 Loop Gallery, Cape Town

Through Oct. 24

Blackness as self-actualization: Umkhondo (A Trail/Mark), 2026
Chuma Adam
99 Loop Gallery

umlambo, 2026
Siyabonga Fani
99 Loop Gallery

This two-person show brings together the work of South African artists Chuma Adam and Siyabonga Fani in a meditation on materials and their connections to memory.

Rising artist Chuma Adam presents monochrome paintings in acrylic on umbhaco cotton, a textile traditionally used to make Xhosa ceremonial garments in South Africa. Her painting process is intensive and physically demanding, with individual, repetitive brushstrokes coalescing into a sea of gestures.

Adam was born in 2001 and is based in Johannesburg. She earned an honors degree in fine arts from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2024 and was shortlisted for the Wits Young Artist Award in 2022 and 2023. Her broader practice encompasses painting, printmaking, textiles, sculpture, and drawing, exploring themes of Blackness, identity, and visibility.

99 Loop Gallery places Adam’s works in a compelling dialogue with Siyabonga Fani’s evocative ceramic vessels. Fani has worked with clay since the 1990s, choosing recycled terra-cotta, a material that carries its own histories. He builds his works freehand, coiling the clay intuitively to create vessels that are highly glossy and marked by organic cracks and rivulets. Fani’s father was a self-taught artist, and Fani draws on paternal inheritance in his process.

Fani was born in 1981 in Gugulethu, Cape Town, and currently works in Woodstock, Cape Town. His interest in ceramics emerged while he was a student at the College of Cape Town, and he founded Siyabonga Ceramics in 2013. His works were exhibited at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, Latitudes Art Fair, and Homo Faber in Venice in 2024, and he had his first solo show, “Ndim Lo [This Is Me],” at Art Formes in Cape Town in 2025.

Matija Bobičić

“The Kingdom”

Moosey, Norwich, England

Through Oct. 31

The Green Hero, 2026
Majita Bobičić
Moosey

The Werewolf Queen, 2026
Majita Bobičić
Moosey

Matija Bobičić’s acrylic-on-canvas paintings look like what might result if Jean-Michel Basquiat tried his hand at painting Biblically accurate angels. The Slovenian artist’s chimerical figures draw from science fiction, pop culture, and Balkan folklore: Baseball-capped bobbleheads, skulls, and dinosaurs all populate the creatures’ wings.

In this new exhibition, Bobičić presents figures that, according to the artist, emerge from “the archetypes of Frankenstein’s monster and the cyborg, the context of the early 1990s, and the challenges of the present moment.” In The Green Hero (2026), for example, a Ninja Turtle is made up of clown-like faces and totemic masks.

Bobičić has also noted his fascination with Warhammer 40,000, a tabletop game and fictional universe whose characters inspire his figures. The artist fuses these techno-futuristic aesthetics with symbols from Balkan folklore.

The artist was born in 1987 in Maribor, Slovenia, where he lives and works. He graduated from the University of Maribor with a degree in art education in 2016. Bobičić has shown with galleries including Marvin Gardens in New York (2018, 2021), Breach Gallery in Miami (2022), Allouche Gallery in Los Angeles (2022), and Alchemy Gallery in New York (2023). He also presented a solo exhibition, “Perfect Organisms,” at the Maribor Art Gallery in Slovenia, and his work has since entered the museum’s collection.

Hisham Sharif

“Allusive Veil”

Ayyam Gallery, Dubai

Through Oct. 30

Behind the Window, 2026
Hisham Sharif
Ayyam Gallery

Red Room with a Rothko, 2026
Hisham Sharif
Ayyam Gallery

Hisham Sharif makes his U.A.E. solo debut with “Allusive Veil,” an exhibition of alluring and ambiguous paintings rooted in heritage and mythology. Sharif’s technique draws on French painters, particularly Bonnard and Vuillard, and their rhythmic, almost psychedelic interiors. Yet his style is firmly contemporary, his scenes pushed to near abstraction. In the painting Behind the Window (2026), for example, the curtained plane of a window gives way to streaking horizontal lines, creating a sense of disorientation. The show also marks Sharif’s first significant use of color, a departure from the monochrome work for which he was previously known.

Born in 1993 in Bahrain, Sharif is the son of artist Abdul Rahim Sharif, who trained in Paris in the 1970s. His past exhibitions include “Frightening the Dark,” his first solo show, in 2017 at the Bahrain Arts Society, and “Sharif & Sharif” in 2022 at the Bahrain Art Centre. He won the Al Dana Award at the 50th Bahrain Annual Fine Arts Exhibition and received a Recognition Award for Outstanding Work at the 45th edition. His work is in the permanent collection of the Bahrain National Museum.

Granite Calimpong

“Under the Bank, Up a Narrow Valley”

Traver Gallery, Seattle

Through Oct. 31

MURKY, 2026
Granite Calimpong
Traver Gallery

SWEET SMELLS OF HERE, 2026
Granite Calimpong
Traver Gallery

Seattle-based sculptor Granite Calimpong explores his relationship with the rugged California coast where he grew up and the Pacific Northwest, where he has lived for nearly two decades, through a series of odd, biomorphic, and delightful ceramic and glass works. In these pieces, Calimpong conjures iridescent surfaces, crusty formations, and mushroom-like protrusions. Made with both glass and ceramics, the works are caught in a state of material flux between earthen depth and shiny translucence, a hint at the duality of the natural world today, where ecological crisis lives alongside the splendor and magic of adaptation.

Calimpong, born in 1982, is the son of California potter Conrad Calimpong. He earned a degree in interdisciplinary computing in the arts from the University of California, San Diego, where he was introduced to glass, and later an MFA in sculpture from the University of Washington in 2019. He has held residencies at the Pittsburgh Glass Center (2013) and North Lands Creative Glass in Scotland (2016), and has had recent solo shows at Traver Gallery (2023) and JamFactory in Adelaide, Australia (2023). He is also a teacher who has led workshops at Pilchuck Glass School, Penland School of Craft, and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts.

Zoe Hawk

“Lost Girls”

Visions West Contemporary, Denver

Oct. 9–Nov. 21

Search Party, 2026
Zoe Hawk
Visions West Contemporary

Portal, 2025
Zoe Hawk
Visions West Contemporary

Zoe Hawk paints candy-colored visions of girlhood—campfire scenes, dances, walks in the woods—but these visions are more sinister than saccharine. In Search Party (2026), for example, a group of doll-like girls walks through the snowy woods, calling out for a lost girl as a fox stalks the trees between them. In another work, The Well (2026), moody girls in knee-high socks and Mary Janes throw rocks into a stone well. These disquieting paintings suggest dark feminine rituals. They are reminiscent of the Showtime series Yellowjackets, in which a girls’ soccer team gets stranded in the woods and begins to turn on each other.

Born in 1982 in St. Louis, Hawk is now based in Columbia, Missouri. She earned a BFA in studio art from Missouri State University and an MFA in painting from the University of Iowa. She has attended residencies in Ireland, Norway, Belgium, and Qatar, and at the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York. Her works have been included in exhibitions such as “From Pangs to Pangolins,” curated by Trenton Doyle Hancock, at Shulamit Nazarian in Los Angeles in 2018. She had a solo show, “Dreaming as the Summers Die,” at Glass Rice in San Francisco that same year, and her work was featured in Zara’s Women in Art clothing collection in 2019.

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Annie Leibovitz photographs OpenAI's Sam Altman in Caspar David Friedrich-inspired portrait for Vanity Fair. https://ift.tt/TzroSMD

Annie Leibovitz has photographed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for the cover of 2026 “New Establishment” issue of Vanity Fair, accompanying a two-part interview with the magazine.

The cover portrait depicts Altman from behind, hands on hips, surveying a foggy coastline from a cliff's edge. The photograph is accompanied by a line of text reading, “Sam Altman sees the future—are we in it?” The composition appears to be a restaging of German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich's iconic 1818 painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, now held in the collection of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. The painting is considered a definitive example of the “Rückenfigur,” an artistic device showing a figure turned away in order to invite viewers to imagine themselves in the painting.

Friedrich's wanderer, shown in a green overcoat, gazing out over a misty mountain landscape, has often been interpreted as contemplation of the sublime, the fog a symbol of the unknown future. In Leibovitz's interpretation, Friedrich's vision of the Elbe Sandstone cliffs in Bohemia is replaced by Bay Area bluffs, and Altman stands in as the solitary man positioned at the edge of a cliff. While Friedrich’s figure contemplated nature’s connection to divinity, Altman, it might be inferred, contemplates the future of artificial intelligence. The reference offers an uneasy inversion, with Friedrich’s figure enthralled by nature, and Altman, the artificial and technological. Altman’s cover story leads Vanity Fair’s revived “New Establishment” list, with the tech CEO addressing AI safety lapses, government regulation, and his rivalry with Elon Musk in an interview.

This is far from the first time Leibovitz has looked to art history for inspiration, linking her subjects to famed precedents for beauty, power, or interiority. In 2002, she photographed actress Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo for Vogue, drawing on Kahlo's own self-portraiture. For a 2013 Vogue shoot, she restaged eight famous paintings using actress Jessica Chastain as her model. The cover pictured Chastain as Frederic Leighton's Flaming June, with reimaginings of works by Vincent van Gogh, René Magritte, Félix Vallotton, and Julia Margaret Cameron accompanying the feature story. More recently, Leibovitz's August 2025 Vogue cover story styled Anne Hathaway as John Singer Sargent's Madame X.

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JW Anderson to host a London pop-up show with artist Cerith Wyn Evans during Frieze Week 2026. https://ift.tt/9hxoFue

JW Anderson flagship store in Pimlico, London. The exhibition centers on a new series of 30 wind chimes that Cerith Wyn Evans developed specifically for the brand, shown alongside selected works by the artist courtesy of White Cube, his representing gallery.

The show, which also brings together designers, makers, and long-standing collaborators from Anderson's creative world, is open to the public from October 15th through 20th, coinciding with Frieze London. Other works on view include ceramics by Akiko Hirai, paintings by Mary Stephenson, and sculptures by Shawanda Corbett.

“A Composition” is presented in partnership with American Express, and Amex Platinum Cardmembers will receive a dedicated preview day on October 14th, ahead of the public opening. They will also receive a complimentary gift from JW Anderson and an exclusive limited-edition work on paper and bookmark with purchase.

The exhibition extends Anderson's long-running involvement in the art world as both collector and curator. His personal collection includes ceramic works by artists Lucie Rie, Jennifer Lee, and Sara Flynn, as well as powerhouses of the 1980s including Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz. He has curated exhibitions for the Hepworth Wakefield, the Holburne Museum, and London's Thomas Dane Gallery, and in 2023 organized the group show “On Foot” at Offer Waterman, also in London.

Anderson has also made art collaboration central to his design work. For his Dior Cruise 2027 collection, shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, he worked with Ed Ruscha on a series of Dior Homme button-down shirts referencing the artist's signature lettering and shadowing. For his brand, JW Anderson, he has previously partnered with the Tom of Finland Foundation and the estate of David Wojnarowicz. “A Composition” follows other recent exhibitions at the JW Anderson store, which has developed into something of a gallery space in its own right for the brand.

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Mayor Zohran Mamdani doubles individual artist grants in New York City to $10,000. https://ift.tt/82GsEi0

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su, and New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) Commissioner Diya Vij have announced that the city will increase its grants for individual artists and small nonprofits from $5,000 to $10,000, the first such increase in nearly 20 years.

Grants, which are distributed through partners in each borough, are open to artists, collectives, and small nonprofits working across film, dance, writing, painting, and other disciplines. Applications are now open in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens. Staten Island's cycle opens in November.

Alongside the increase, DCLA's Materials for the Arts program will also launch a monthly “shopping day” for grantees to access free art supplies. “Artists are working New Yorkers with the same costs as everyone else. But while rent, grocery bills, and child care costs have skyrocketed in New York City, the funding artists rely on has stayed flat,” Mamdani said in a statement. “Doubling these grants is a critical step towards making sure that the painters, musicians, filmmakers, and other artists who bring life to this city can afford to call it home.” Vij, who said she spent the past six months in town halls with working artists across the five boroughs, called the increase “our first step to deeper, more meaningful support.”

Mamdani also relayed the news in a more informal Instagram announcement. In the clip, he is filmed painting at an easel across from Vij, saying, “Artists are forced to make hard choices when it comes to living in this city and getting paid. There's never been a better time to apply.” According to Hyperallergic, the news follows a $323.8 million allocation for DCLA in the city's Fiscal Year 2027 budget. It marks the highest-ever yearly appropriation for the agency, which ensures public funding to supports cultural organizations throughout New York City.

A January report from the Center for an Urban Future noted that the city's resident artist population has fallen 4.4 percent since 2019, its first measurable decline in decades.

The increase extends a pattern of arts investment under Mamdani, who in July announced a Groundswell Community Mural Project commissioning 12 artist-led, community-painted murals across the five boroughs for the FIFA World Cup 2026. Mamdani has separately partnered with the Met Opera and the Theatre Development Fund to expand free and low-cost access to performances for New York residents and students.

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Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden to reopen in October 2026 following Hiroshi Sugimoto redesign. https://ift.tt/y4V0Exa

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden's Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, will reopen on October 31st following a reimagining of the landscape by Japanese artist and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto. The project marks the most significant rethinking of the garden since American modernist architect Gordon Bunshaft conceived the Hirshhorn's distinctive cylindrical museum and sunken sculpture garden more than half a century ago. The garden first opened to the public in 1974. In 1981, landscape architect Lester Collins added additional lawns, trees, ramps, and shaded outdoor spaces. Sugimoto's intervention preserves the essential character of Bunshaft's modernist campus while creating a more open, varied, and flexible setting for the museum's collection of modern and contemporary sculpture.

Central to the design is a series of monumental, stacked stone walls that divide the landscape into a sequence of distinct but interconnected spaces, including the East and Central Gardens and West Lawn. The stone offers an elemental counterpoint to Bunshaft's concrete architecture and a restrained backdrop for sculpture spanning more than a century.

The redesigned garden will allow the Hirshhorn to display 50 percent more artworks outdoors. Some 24 major sculptures from Joseph H. Hirshhorn's Foundational Gift will return to view, including works by Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti, and Barbara Hepworth, presented in dialogue with living artists and new commissions rather than organized as a chronological survey.

A wider “front door” will create at-grade sightlines into the garden from the National Mall, while five points of entry, new east and west overlooks, twice as many accessible entrances, and expanded shade and seating will make the previously secluded space more porous. An underground passageway will reconnect the garden directly to the museum, establishing a physical route between the indoor galleries, Sugimoto's landscape, and the Mall.

According to the Washington Post, the overhaul also includes a revamped reflecting pool. and A rotating exhibition program will also launch with a spotlight on large aluminum figures by Yoshitomo Nara.

Sugimoto's design extends his longstanding relationship with the Hirshhorn, which was the first museum to present a major retrospective of his work and, in 2018, invited him to reimagine its lobby.

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Lee Krasner Steps Out From Pollock’s Shadow https://ift.tt/8HJWeVj

In 1957, Lee Krasner moved her painting tools and set up her studio in the barn on the property of her home in Springs, New York, a hamlet in eastern Long Island. The barn—a single-light-filled space measuring roughly 20 by 20 feet—had previously been the studio of her late husband, Jackson Pollock. But from 1957 until Krasner’s death in 1984, the barn was her domain, and there she took full advantage of the space and freedom finally afforded her, producing the most brilliant works of her career.

A dazzling new exhibition, “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, brings together the works of husband and wife, tracing the trajectory of their careers. The show begins with Krasner, opening with a series of abstract collage paintings from the mid-1950s made from cut-up fragments of her old canvases and drawings. It concludes with Krasner, too, closing with Past Continuous (1976), a monumental collage Krasner made from her own Cubist-inspired drawings from the 1930s from which the show takes its name. Pollock’s breathtaking drip paintings appear in the middle like a storm, a force of nature that tore through Krasner’s life.

In his lifetime, Pollock had become synonymous with the barn. There, he had flung, dripped, and poured paint onto canvases unrolled across its floors. In 1949, Life magazine immortalized Pollock and his studio with a profile entitled “Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?” The editorial featured photographer Martha Holmes’s now-iconic images of Pollock at work, dripping paint from a brush with a cigarette dangling from his lips.

Pollock and Krasner had moved to Springs from New York City in 1945, using a loan from gallerist and collector Peggy Guggenheim for the down payment on a two-story home. They had come to the bucolic seaside town seeking an escape from the distractions and demands of city life so they could focus on their work. Pollock first worked in an upstairs bedroom and Krasner in the cramped kitchen. Later, Pollock moved his studio into the property’s barn, and Krasner took the upstairs bedroom he had vacated.

In August 1956, Pollock crashed his car on the side of the road after a night of heavy drinking, killing himself and his passenger, Edith Metzger, a friend of his mistress, Ruth Kligman. Kligman, who was also in the car, survived.

Krasner, who had been traveling in Europe at the time of the crash, returned immediately to plan his funeral. Slowly, in the months that followed, she returned to her practice, eventually moving her tools into the barn, close to a year after his death. For many years, the barn had smelled of the kerosene used to heat a stove, but Pollock had winterized it in 1953, insulating the walls and covering the floor with Masonite squares left over from a printing job by his brother, Sanford. When Krasner entered the studio in 1957, she walked on tiles that hid Pollock’s paint splatters covering the wood floor beneath.

Often, stories of Krasner’s life seem to end with Pollock’s death, but in reality, she was just embarking on the most fruitful years of her artistic career.

Krasner, a rising star

She was born Lena Krassner in Brooklyn in 1908, the fourth of six children in a working-class, Orthodox Jewish household where English, Russian, and Yiddish mingled. Krasner rebelled early and leaned into art. She studied at the Woman’s Art School of Cooper Union, the National Academy of Design (which suspended her for entering a basement off-limits to women), and City College, before she enrolled in 1937 at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts. There, as The Met’s exhibition catalogue notes, she “imbibed the tenets of Cubism and came to revere Henri Matisse.”

In late 1941, the painter John Graham invited her to show in “American and French Paintings” at McMillen Inc. Krasner, who had cultivated friendships with many in the New York art world, knew every name on the list except Pollock’s. She found his address and called on him at his Eighth Street studio. “I was overwhelmed, bowled over, that’s all,” she later said. “I felt as if the floor was sinking when I saw those paintings.” By 1942, they were dating.

“Krasner held the more prominent artistic reputation of the two. She was better educated and more firmly entrenched in the close-knit and pugnacious New York art world,” write curators David Breslin and Brinda Kumar in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue. Her paintings of the period “articulated still-life forms and figures in thick paint, fusing geometric shapes with organic forms in overlapping planes over flat backgrounds of white or gray,” with primary blues, reds, and yellows “knit together by strong black lines.” Mondrian was an influence, and she often recalled with pride that he admired these works.

Krasner moved into Pollock’s East Eighth Street apartment in fall 1942, and they married in October 1945. A month later, with a $2,000 loan from Peggy Guggenheim, the couple bought a farmhouse and five acres in Springs, complete with a barn.

An era of doubt and rebirth

The move came in the middle of what Krasner called her “black-out period,” in which, as the catalogue puts it, she built up paint on her canvases but no image emerged, producing her “gray slabs.”

Pollock, long in the thrall of Picasso, had finally broken with Cubism, but Krasner wasn’t ready. She said this rupture “took me two years to digest. Between 1943 and 1944 I tried to undo my Cubist orientation and produced very little work in a rather anxious situation.”

But her work also took a backseat to Pollock’s career, which she championed using her connections and good graces to earn the truculent Pollock opportunities, introducing him to Robert Motherwell, Roberto Matta, and Surrealist ideas, including automatic drawing.

“At the expense of her own work,” art historian Kirk Varnedoe wrote, “Krasner poured her energy and intelligence into furthering Pollock’s efforts.” Scholar Robert Hobbs reads the gray slabs of this era as Krasner grappling with news of the Holocaust, slowly emerging from Europe.

Eventually, Krasner broke through this era of artistic doubt. Working in the upstairs bedroom Pollock had vacated, she made the “Little Images,” compact, impastoed canvases of “small dabs of paint intentionally placed in even adjacency” that became “a chromatic prism through which Krasner unlocked an endless palette.”

In 1953, following a disappointing solo show in 1951, she began recycling her unsold canvases into large collages. Some of these works include scraps of Pollock’s discarded drawings and canvases, among them Bald Eagle (1955). In the fall of 1955, at the age of 46, Krasner opened a solo exhibition of her collage paintings at dealer Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery in New York, marking her second solo show in New York. While dealer Betty Parsons was the show’s only buyer, the exhibition earned strong reviews with Stuart Preston of the New York Times calling her “a good noisy colorist” and Fairfield Porter writing, in ARTnews, that her art “seems to be about nature” and makes viewers “aware of a subtle disorder greater than [they] might otherwise have thought possible.” The show marked a new era of creativity for Krasner. Pollock, in a downward spiral fueled by alcoholism, meanwhile created only one painting that year.

Krasner’s crescendo

After moving into the barn in 1957, Krasner’s scale and her palette changed. In early 1958, she exhibited 17 of her “Earth Green” paintings, large-scale bright abstractions seemingly inspired by nature, at Martha Jackson Gallery. Stuart Preston wrote in a review in the Times that “the sheer energy that Miss Krasner manages to generate on her picture surfaces.”

Her work went well beyond her canvases, however. Krasner worked tirelessly to secure Pollock’s legacy, and became a key source for critics and curators writing about him. She collaborated on the 1958 traveling retrospective of his work and placed his estate with Marlborough Gallery. When Marlborough’s director offered to represent her too, she declined, preferring to be asked on her own terms, not as his executor.

After her mother died in 1959, insomnia drove Krasner to paint at night under artificial light. The result was the “Umber” series, which the critic Cindy Nemser described as “slashing, splintered strokes of raw umber and white.” By the mid-1960s, bright colors had returned in works like Combat (year), which measures more than 5 by 13 feet, in riotous twists and folds of pink and orange color.

In 1965, Krasner took a step out of Pollock’s shadow when she opened “Lee Krasner: Paintings, Drawings, and Collages,” a retrospective of her work at the Whitechapel Gallery, her first solo exhibition outside the U.S. In 1974, the curator Bryan Robertson found a box of her 1930s drawings from Hofmann’s classes. She cut them into strips and shards, and rebuilt them as canvases named for verb tenses. “I am never free of the past,” she said. “I believe in continuity… the past is part of the present which becomes part of the future.”

At the end of her life, Krasner was looking to the future through her own past. The ailing artist donated her assets, made up mainly from her work and Pollock’s, to create a foundation that would support the work of young artists. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation has granted over $90 million to artists since it was established in 1985, and is the first successful foundation established by an artist, for artists.

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Anina Major’s Giant Woven Ceramic Pots Rethink Bahamian Craft Traditions https://ift.tt/fPUCuBg

Water Tower, 2024
Anina Major
TERN Gallery

In Anina Major’s sculpture Water Tower (2024), strips of woven stoneware climb upward into a 45-inch-tall column, its ombré glaze deepening from pale aqua to rich turquoise. Melted sea glass glints across its irregular surface, while sand gathers around its base. The piece exemplifies the artist’s engagement with palm plaiting, a Bahamian weaving tradition that women have passed down for generations, often as a crucial source of their own income. Major expands the woven form, giving a familiar craft language a monumental presence.

In 2024, Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) acquired the sculpture, which will appear in “The Sacred Mangrove,” Major’s first solo presentation at a major international institution. The show, organized by curator Jennifer Inacio, will open at PAMM on October 1st.

At the museum, Major’s towering ceramic forms rise like sentinels throughout the waterfront gallery. Folkloric bottle trees create a protective presence. Shells and reused ceramic shards scatter across the ground, while a soundscape recorded on a Bahamian beach brings the acoustics of the artist’s home country into the installation.

“I was thinking about the similarities between Miami and the Bahamas,” Major told Artsy. “Not just how Miami has functioned within the historical context of Bahamian culture, but this idea of connecting entities, drawing a line between the two.” With her installation, the artist intends to “command more space and prominence,” enhancing the impact she can make as she works at a larger scale.

The PAMM exhibition arrives weeks after the opening of “SOON COME HOME,” Major’s second solo presentation with TERN Gallery in Nassau, the Bahamas, on view through October 26th. The shows honor an artist who’s nearly a decade into her unique, hybrid practice of translating plaiting into ceramics.

Major began experimenting with this process while studying ceramics at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she earned her MFA in 2017. She learned plaiting through her grandmother, Saphora Alvina Timothy Newbold, known as Mar, who passed the tradition on to other women in the Bahamas. Major has since studied how weaving patterns traveled across the islands and changed from place to place, something she describes as “repetition with adaptation.”

Major cuts rolled slabs of clay into thin strips, then weaves them while they are still pliable. In “The Sacred Mangrove,” she primarily uses plain weave (a simple over-under pattern that creates a checkerboard appearance), while sculptures including Rooted Sky (2026) and Forgotten Maiden No. 3 (2025) incorporate twill and reed-based patterns.

Major often works early in the morning, when ideas come faster than she can realize them. She describes her process as responsive: “There’s something about the clay that tells you when it’s ready to be done,” she said.

House in the Sky, 2026
Anina Major
TERN Gallery

Skyscraper, 2026
Anina Major
TERN Gallery

That extends to glazing. She said she favors a “rich, juicy” surface, with built-up layers. The kiln introduces its own variables, warping the clay or shifting a glaze in ways she cannot fully anticipate. The artist builds further richness through firing techniques and materials beyond clay. In House in the Sky (2026), on view in “SOON COME HOME,” sand and flocking meet a glossy glaze that shifts from mossy green to cream. The Kumbla (2026) pairs salt-fired stoneware with sea glass and sand, its deep blue and violet giving way to areas of pale stoneware.

At first, ceramics offered Major a way to preserve the knowledge she had inherited. Her early works drew from woven bags and dolls associated with Bahamian tourism. Major remembers looking at a souvenir small enough to fit in her palm and wondering what would happen if she deconstructed and magnified it. That impulse eventually produced works like Sandcastle (2025), a roughly 1,100-pound stoneware sculpture that grew out of experiments she began during a 2023 residency at the European Ceramic Work Centre.

The Kumbla, 2026
Anina Major
TERN Gallery

In 2025, Major settled in upstate New York, where she began renovating a former service station into a studio with room for her increasingly ambitious work. That year, Sandcastle was named a finalist for the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize. For Major, enlarging these forms is about how the traditions behind them are valued. “I’m not trying to replace souvenirs in the marketplace,” she said. “I’m actually trying to shift perception and value around that work.”

As her sculptures grew, Major also began thinking about how her individual pieces could inhabit space together. Seeing Betye Saar’s show “Serious Moonlight” at ICA Miami in 2021 brought Major to tears. “I felt seen,” she said. “I was moved by how she allows her symbolic vocabulary to expand spatially.”

The exhibition showed her how individual sculptures could become part of an immersive, room-sized installation. Major also looked to Japanese American ceramic artist Toshiko Takaezu, whose Homage to Devastation Forest (1982 – 1987), exhibited in the Noguchi Museum’s 2024 retrospective “Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within,” brings ceramic forms together as a sculptural landscape.

In “The Sacred Mangrove,” Major pushes her work in this direction, treating the exhibition space as an environment rather than a backdrop for individual sculptures. The mangrove became her framework, connecting Miami and the Bahamas through an ecosystem native to each place. Major describes it as “connective tissue” between them. PAMM’s glass-walled space overlooking Biscayne Bay further shaped the installation, which remains visible from outside after dark.

In Nassau, Major’s work is expanding through material. “SOON COME HOME” marks the first time her signature ceramic doll series (including Brassy, 2025), inspired by the straw dolls sold in Bahamian tourist markets, appears in glass.

For Major, home remains a source of inspiration and a place to return to as her practice continues to evolve. “There’s this weird thing that feels like this is just the beginning,” she said.

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