Image: Anina Major. Water Tower, 2024. Glazed stoneware, melted sea glass, and sand. 45 x 11 x 11 inches. Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase with funds provided by PAMM's Collectors Council. © Anina Major. Courtesy the artist and Tern Gallery. Photo: Andrew White.
The event will take place at Pérez Art Museum Miami as part of the opening of ‘Anina Major: The Sacred Mangrove,’ presented as an evening of art and conversation.
The conversation will explore Major’s creative process and how she translates ancestral weaving practices into ceramic sculptures and installations.
Bahamian-born artist Anina Major, born in 1981 in Nassau, Bahamas, and now living in New York, works at the intersection of ceramics, sculpture, and installation, using clay to eternalize the cultural practice of weaving, a tradition that holds stories of labor and ancestry. By hand-weaving clay to resemble palm-leaf plaiting, she transforms a tradition rooted in softness and impermanence into one of permanence and reverence. Major’s practice reflects the tension between the Bahamas’ image as a marketed paradise and the undervalued cultural traditions that define its identity.
The environment will feature towering woven clay sculptures, bottle trees, and a path of crushed conch shells, materials that ground the installation in the cultural and ecological history of the Caribbean. For the forthcoming project at PAMM, Major expands these ideas into an installation that includes ‘Water Tower’ (2024), a work from the museum’s collection.
‘Anina Major: The Sacred Mangrove’ is organized by Jennifer Inacio, PAMM curator.
