Magdalene Odundo @ Xavier Hufkens, Brussels - Ceramic Vessels and a Large-Scale Glass Installation

Magdalene Odundo

Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

13 November 2025 —​ 24 January 2026

Xavier Hufkens presents Kenyan-born British artist Magdalene Odundo’s first exhibition at the gallery. Featuring a new body of ceramic vessels and the large-scale glass installation Transition II (2014), the exhibition showcases the two central disciplines that shape her artistic practice.

At the heart of the exhibition is a recent series of ceramic vessels, a form that has been a cornerstone of Odundo’s practice for nearly five decades. These vessels, refined in shape and rich in symbolism, draw inspiration from a wide array of global ceramic traditions—African, European, Asian, and Indigenous American – as by the human body, which Magdalene Odundo likewise regards as a vessel. Her work carries a distinct anthropomorphic presence: gestures, physical states and bodily movements often serve as starting points for a vessel’s form, silhouette, proportion or balance. As one of the oldest and most universal of human-made objects, vessels transcend time, geography and culture. Moreover, they are rich with dualities: inside and outside, fullness and emptiness, fragility and strength. These oppositions echo the deeper conceptual themes in the artist’s oeuvre, such as transition, identity and cultural hybridity. For Magdalene Odundo, the vessel is more than a physical object. It is an archetypal and elemental form through which to articulate relationships – between materials, histories, cultures and individuals.

The making of each vessel is a laborious and intensely physical act. Working alone, Magdalene Odundo hand-builds her vessels using coiling techniques before meticulously burnishing their surfaces. The distinctive colours – typically deep terracotta and lustrous black – emerge from a controlled firing process. This slow, embodied method underscores the intimate relationship between maker and material. In Odundo’s practice, the vessel is not a static object, but a living entity. Left unglazed, the works retain a subtle porosity, enhancing their sense of life and allowing them, quite literally, to "breathe."

Also on view is Transition II (2014), a large-scale installation comprising 1001 suspended glass vessels. Each vessel is individually mouth-blown yet they are united by a formal coherence that balances repetition and variation. In contrast to Odundo’s ceramic practice, which is a solitary activity, glass-blowing is a collective endeavour. The vessels in Transition II are inspired by an ancient Egyptian glass earplug in the Petrie Museum in London, a reflection of Odundo’s ongoing engagement with historical forms and cross-cultural material references. The resulting objects appear to hover in space: weightless and precarious; they are ‘hanging by a thread’. Glass, like clay, is an ancient and elemental medium, both ubiquitous and fragile, that is transformed by fire. In a phenomenon known as the ‘melt memory effect’, it retains information about its previous crystalline structure, even after heating above its glass transition temperature. These qualities are central to Transition II, and resonate with broader themes in Odundo’s practice.

The installation draws visual and conceptual parallels with a murmuration – a phenomenon in which large flocks of starlings move in coordinated, shape-shifting formations. Within this work, each glass shape maintains its singularity while simultaneously contributing to an energetic, collective rhythm. In an era increasingly marked by fragmentation and estrangement, Transition II speaks of gathering and mutual recognition, whereby uniqueness and difference contribute to a dynamic whole.

Magdalene A N Odundo (b. 1950) received her initial training as a graphic artist in Kenya before moving to the UK in 1971. She studied at the Cambridge School of Art (now Anglia Ruskin University), the University for the Creative Arts and the Royal College of Art. In 2018, Magdalene Odundo was appointed Chancellor of the University for Creative Arts (UCA) and was made a Dame in the Queen’s New Year Honours list in 2020. She has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at Houghton Hall, Norfolk, England (2024); the Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Canada (2023-2024); The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, England and Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, England (2019); The High Museum of Art, Atlanta GA, USA (2017); British Council, Nairobi, Kenya (2005); Blackwell House, Bowness-on-Windermere, England (2001); The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C., USA (1995); Stedelijk Museum Voor Hedendaagse Kunst, s’Hertogenbosch, Netherlands (1994); Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, Germany; and Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe, Germany (1992).

XAVIER HUFKENS

6 rue St-Georges | St-Jorisstraat, 1050 Brussels

www.xavierhufkens.com

Sana Musasama @ Eric Firestone Gallery, NYC - "Raised Earth" Exhibition

Sana Musasama: Raised Earth

Eric Firestone Gallery, New York

September 5 – October 18, 2025

Sana Musasama in her studio, 2023

Photograph by Grace Roselli, Pandora’s BoxX Project

Sana Musasama

House Series #17, 2023

Glazed earthenware, 25 x 16 x 11 in.

© Sana Musasama, courtesy Eric Firestone Gallery

Eric Firestone Gallery presents its first solo exhibition of the internationally recognized ceramic artist Sana Musasama. The exhibition is a dynamic installation of Musasama’s formative House series: vertically stacked ceramic sculptures, like abstracted small-scale temples, exploring multicultural connections to home and community. The work is inspired by the artist’s time living in adobe houses in West Africa in the mid-1970s, her recurrent travel to Cambodia, and time spent in the American West.

The slab-formed ceramics are multi-planar, touched and textured structures with deep color areas and repeated oval shapes that can be read variously as eyes, leaves, or vaginal forms. They are etched with intricate sgraffito marks suggesting body adornment, weavings, flora, and fauna. Elements extend from the planes: rings suggesting jewelry and grids like open baskets or seed pods. In her House series, Sana Musasama uses both earthenware and stoneware and accomplishes her vivid colors through various ceramic glazes, often finishing her works with salt or soda firing to create exquisite surfaces that contrast with the red-brown clay she prefers.

Sana Musasama

Tuscarona (House Series #4), 1983-1984

Glazed earthenware, 64 x 14 x 10 in.

© Sana Musasama, courtesy Eric Firestone Gallery

Sana Musasama first began her House series in the late 1970s, and they were the subject of a 1985 exhibition at the Studio Museum, following her 1983–84 residency with the museum. She decided to revisit these works 45 years later, creating what she called “siblings” to the original works in response to the isolation of 2020. Over the past two years, the artist has worked across the globe to create about twenty significant new House sculptures. This will be the first time work from the two periods are joined into a solo, survey exhibition.

Sana Musasama (b. 1951, New York, NY) is a Black activist feminist artist and global citizen, whose time spent living with women and girls in village societies in Cambodia, South America, Asia, and West Africa has shaped her artwork, developed alongside her humanitarian work. She defines her practice through the motto "Inspire, Commit, Act."

Sana Musasama grew up in St. Albans, Queens, and continues to live and work in her childhood home. She received her BA from City College, City University of New York in 1974, and her MFA from Alfred University in 1987. Musasama’s first formative trip was to Sierra Leone in the 1970s, where she lived amongst the Mende people. Musasama notes that traveling around the world centered and grounded her, making her understand the differences between what she grew up with, and how others around the world grew up and lived.

During her travels, which often involved living in village societies, she would first get to know people and the culture by going to markets, which were dominated by women. Sana Musasama came to understand how women look out for other women. Young girls—the daughters of these women—often became her guides, as she learned the language, how to shop, prepare food, and use tools.

She also came to appreciate how clay is everywhere, and that “it comes in as many different colors as we do.” The landscape and the decorative arts were inspirations for her work. The patterns of rice paddies in Vietnam found their way onto the surfaces of her ceramics, as did the sgraffito lines of the temples of Burma. She understood that baskets—which were often lined with clay or mud—were the origins of pottery, and incorporated the patterns of their weaving. Cinnamon plants sold on the side of the road informed leaf patterns. The sight of rows of cabbages inspired her to experiment with walls of clay conveying compression. Abstract signs and symbols were everywhere: in adornment practices, markings of identity, and clothing that signified specific societies. Sana Musasama combined these visual forms with her expertise in ceramics.

Sana Musasama recognized that her travels were joyous but also could be uncomfortable, scary, and dangerous, and these feelings were embedded into the forms. Her small-scale temples explore healing from multi-generational trauma through the touch of clay.

Through an article in Glamour in 2006, Sana Musasama learned about the Somaly Mam Foundation, which rescued teenage girls and young women who were victims of sex trafficking. She traveled to Cambodia to volunteer for a program that used artmaking and craftwork as a healing modality from this trauma. After her first experience, she knew that she would spend the rest of her life working with these Cambodian girls on beading and textiles. She developed the entrepreneurial “Apron Project” to give girls who lacked education an extra way to make income through their creations. On her first trip to Cambodia, Sana Musasama was dismayed to realize she had never been taught about the Cambodian genocide. She began to make ceramic work reflecting the images and remains she saw.

Musasama’s self-stated goal is to create art “for us,” centering her experience as a Black woman, to tell cultural and historical stories which are often suppressed. Her work often moves past its racist, historical narrative. They speak of cultural pride and self love. From early in her career, Sana Musasama has been committed to spaces that highlight Black artists and celebrate multiculturalism within New York. In addition to the Studio Museum, she had a residency and exhibitions at the Jamaica Arts Center (where she has taught since 2008), and showed at Cinque Gallery in the 1980s.

Sana Musasama is the recipient of an Anonymous Was a Woman Grant (2002) and the Outstanding Achievement Award (2018) from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) for her years of teaching and her humanitarian work with victims of sex trafficking in Cambodia. In 2024 she was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY, and became the first recipient of the NCECA Innovator Award. Musasama's work is held in the collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH; the Museum of Art and Design, New York; Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; Mint Museum of Craft and Design, Charlotte, NC; the European Ceramic Center in Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands; the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York.

Eric Firestone Gallery began working with Sana Musasama in 2022, presenting an in-depth solo installation of her work at the 2023 New York edition of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair. Over the past two years, Sana Musasama has participated in a series of residency programs: the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Edgecomb, ME; Township10, Marshall, NC; The New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, NY; Penland School of Craft, Mitchell County, NC; the Archie Bray Foundation, Helena, MT; and most recently the Shangyu Celadon Modern International Ceramic Center in Zhejiang Province, China.

Her work will be included in the exhibitions Re-Union: Syd Carpenter, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Judy Moonelis, Sana Musasama, and Winnie Owens Hart at the Frances M. Maguire Art Museum and Clay Has Memory: Generational Knowledge from Africa at the Princeton University Art Museum, both opening in 2026.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Patricia Spears Jones.

ERIC FIRESTONE GALLERY

40 Great Jones Street, New York, NY 10012

www.ericfirestonegallery.com

Wayne Ngan @ James Cohan Gallery, NYC - "Spirit and Form" Ceramics Exhibition

Wayne Ngan: Spirit and Form

James Cohan Gallery, New York

September 5 — October 4, 2025 

Wayne Ngan 

Yellow Vase with Lugs, 2016, Rust Coloured Vase, 2017 

Yukon Black Jar with Geometric Lugs, c. 2000s, 

Thin Vase with Cast Iron Glaze, 2014, White Vase, 2016 

Photo courtesy of James Cohan Gallery

Wayne Ngan (b. 1937 Guangdong, China - d. 2020 Hornby Island, BC, Canada) is recognized as one of Canada’s premier ceramic artists. Ngan’s lengthy career spanned over six decades. At the age of thirteen, Wayne Ngan moved from Guangdong, China to a vastly different British Columbia, Canada. Wayne Ngan was determined to make a name for himself as an artist despite challenging circumstances. His practice drew influence from traditional Chinese, Korean, and Japanese pottery, as well as Modernist painting, pre-Columbian and ancient Egyptian art. Ngan’s extensive knowledge of these historic precedents and his connection to the natural beauty of Canada’s Hornby Island informed his abstract sculptural forms. This exhibition at James Cohan spotlights a selection of cornerstone works, created in the 1990s and the last decade of the artist’s life.

Inspired by the back-to-the-land movement, popularized in the 1960s and 70s, Wayne Ngan centered his life and artistic practice around a harmonious relationship with the environment anchored in self-sufficiency. Ngan sourced natural materials both to build his home and studio on Hornby Island, and also to fuel his artmaking, experimenting with creating various glazes from clay like Yukon black, a deep noir glaze with high shine. Ngan was committed to exploring process, using the wealth of knowledge he gained from his regular travels to China and Japan as well as independent research to refine techniques such as raku, hakeme (coarse brush decoration), and salt glazing. Waynes Ngan built his forms by throwing and altering pieces of clay, then sculpting them together. He would occasionally fashion elements that extend outwards and generate curvilinear, spouted openings in others. Here, elegantly elongated vessels in earth tones are in dialogue with compact lidded forms, which seem to contain the energy Ngan expended to render them. Their surfaces are varied – ranging from textural and patterned to slick and smooth. According to Wayne Ngan, “There are two ways of looking at pots: one is the actual clay pot, but the real pot to me is all around me—the spirit of the pot.”

Through his work in clay, Wayne Ngan fused East and West, the past and the present, collapsing disparate chronologies and geographies into intimate, evocative objects.

CERAMIC ARTIST WAYNE NGAN

Wayne Ngan studied at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, formerly the Vancouver School of Art. The influential teachings of British potter Bernard Leach and Soetsu Yanagi, founder of the Mingei, a Japanese folk art movement (prioritizing beauty in the everyday) resonated strongly with ceramic artists in British Columbia, including Wayne Ngan. In 1967, Wayne Ngan settled on Hornby Island, where he lived and worked until his passing in 2020.

Wayne Ngan’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions since the 1960s at venues including the Vancouver Art Gallery; the National Gallery of Canada; the Gardiner Museum, Toronto; Hanart Art Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan; Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York; the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; The Apartment in Vancouver; and the American Crafts Museum, Concord, Massachusetts, among others. Ngan’s ceramics are in notable public collections such as the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Montréal Museum of Fine Art, the Gardiner Museum, the National Palace Museum (Taipei, Taiwan), the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the Canadian Museum of Civilization, and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia.

JAMES COHAN

48 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.jamescohan.com

Ken Price @ McClain Gallery, Houston - A Focus Exhibition

Ken Price: A Focus Exhibition

McClain Gallery, Houston

November 1 – December 30, 2023

Ken Price (1935 – 2012) is best known for his innovative ceramic sculpture and is recognized as one of the most important sculptors to have emerged in Los Angeles in the 20th century. Throughout his 50+ year career, Price also made extraordinary drawings with watercolor of varied subjects from sculpture studies and still lifes to landscapes and erotic drawings. Ken Price rose to prominence in the early 1960s and was a key player in the explosion of the Los Angeles Contemporary art scene in the 60s.

Born in Los Angeles in 1935, Ken Price grew up near the beach and spent his youth surfing nearly every day. Price began studying art at Santa Monica Collage at the age of 18. He went on to earn a BFA in 1956 from the University of Southern California and took ceramics classes at the Chouinard Art Institute and Otis College of Art and Design, where he studied under Peter Voulkos. Ken Price earned an MFA in 1959 from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University and had his gallery debut at the legendary Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles just a year later, at the age of 25. He quickly established himself with several successful solo exhibitions, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1969.

Ken Price exhibited extensively until his death in 2012, at his home in Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico, just outside of Taos. That same year a major retrospective of his work, on which he collaborated with friend and architect Frank Gehry, was staged at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas. Works by Price are held in numerous museum collections, among them The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

McCLAIN GALLERY

2242 Richmond Avenue, Houston, TX 77098

www.mcclaingallery.com