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.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/QmeS9Gw
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