The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
Detroit artist Kimberly LaVonne’s ceramic works are a narrative homage to memories from her childhood while living on the United States Army base, Ft. Clayton (now Ciudad del Saber), in Panama. LaVonne’s father was in the military and requested to be stationed in her mother’s native country while LaVonne was young. The family lived there for four years before returning to their home base in St. Robert, Missouri. In the years that followed, they returned to Panama, often for months at a time, allowing LaVonne to feel re-immersed in the culture. Her mother, aunts, and grandmother still live there, and LaVonne recently returned from a visit after a two-year hiatus.
“Growing up in the Midwest with my mother living in Panama, it was and continues to be a struggle to feel a part of this community,” she shares. The focus of LaVonne’s ceramic work, both in form and surface, enables her to stay connected to that community and its vibrant culture. The themes of death and remembrance also factor prominently in LaVonne’s vessels, fueled by a long fascination with the human body and reliquaries. Her works feel like reliquaries themselves, repositories for memory and her heritage.
Human Anatomy as Influence
On a trip to Italy as a graduate student, LaVonne visited La Specola in Florence, the oldest public museum in the world and one of Europe’s oldest natural history museums. She was captivated by the anatomical wax models on display there. These lifelike figures, created by well-known Florentine wax artists of the 17th and 18th centuries, served as teaching aids in the scientific and medical communities, illustrating human anatomy to those without access to a corpse. The anatomical wax Venuses on display made a particular impression upon LaVonne. These female nudes are often in reclining poses with their rib cages and stomachs pulled open to reveal their intestines. LaVonne found beauty in these figures, describing the intestines as “floating out of their body,” and reminiscent of “blooming tea leaves.”
32 As a graduate student at Indiana University, Bloomington, LaVonne was focused on ceramic figurative sculpture—intestinal forms, teeth, and wall hangings of imaginary saints she deemed patrons of various body parts. Turning to medical books on the history of anatomy, conjoined twins, and various medical ailments, she would create collages of what she calls “new anatomy.” These collages became the basis for a three-dimensional life-size series of ceramic intestinal forms that were hung at the abdominal height of the viewer. Working on this series, LaVonne was thinking about the notion of introspection, of “the duality of viscera folded within us, not only as anatomy, but also as the essence of our own being.”
This interest in anatomy is reflected in her current body of work, in which body parts, portraiture, and teeth appear on the narrative surface. Sometimes sculpted teeth are added to works, and other times teeth are carved into the surface of the clay. She adds, “The teeth take on a figurative quality of their own, and they’re also playful. I think of them as little ghosts swimming through the composition.”
A Fascination with Reliquaries
Inspired by the collected works she has seen in museums around the world, LaVonne has reflected a great deal on what those personal collections represent. “There are these small bits of us that get left behind, and there’s something kind of beautiful in that,” she reflects.
Noting that she didn’t grow up in a religious family, LaVonne enjoys the mystery surrounding her fascination with saints. She’s particularly interested in reliquaries: the often ornate containers that store or display the remains of saints and martyrs. Dating back to the Middle Ages, these containers were often covered with narrative scenes depicting the life of the saint whose remains they contained. The remains within might consist of fragments of hair, clothing, shards of bone, or teeth. Prior to 1200 C.E., the containers, often in bust or figure form, were designed to conceal their contents. Later, some reliquaries allowed the contents to be visible, with the relic often on display behind clear glass. “They act as small mementos to the whole and also have a figurative quality of their own,” notes LaVonne.
Making Work that is Personal
In 2020, LaVonne was named an Emerging Artist by Ceramics Monthly, the same year she relocated to Detroit, Michigan. She had planned a trip to visit her mother in Panama when Covid hit. “It felt like the world was on fire,” she recalls. Forced to cancel her trip, she decided to create a ceramic self-portrait. She’s wearing a tiger-patterned skirt known as a saburet, typically worn by the Indigenous Kuna people, that she got in Panama. Looking back, she says, “I think I was just trying to put myself in a place I couldn’t be.” Repeating checked patterns carved into the clay reflected the anxiety LaVonne was feeling at the time and offered a catharsis. This project served as a catalyst for exploring more personal themes in her work that spoke to her desire to stay connected to her Panamanian heritage.
She recalls the lengthy road trips her family would take from the military base to Santiago to visit her grandmother. Those winding roads and rolling hills along the four-hour drive might appear on the surface of her vessels today, while a memorable school field trip to a jungle inspires the native flora and fauna that often appear in her sgraffitoed illustrations. Her mother, aunts, and grandmother— “strong women with strong personalities,” notes LaVonne—also inspire her. She’s curious about how those traits might get passed down in ways that carry some mystery and inform her work in more subtle ways.
Clay as Canvas
LaVonne’s coil- and slab-constructed forms (she rolls large coils and flattens them into thick slabs to build with) often begin with inspiration from Pre-Columbian Coclé pottery and her collection of books on Panamanian ceramics. Not having a fixed plan for the outcome of a piece allows her the freedom to be led intuitively while she’s working.
The forms serve as canvases for layers of drawings and intricate sgraffito carved patterns. Having studied painting along with ceramics as an undergraduate student at the University of Central Missouri, creating imagery on clay came naturally to LaVonne. “What I couldn’t figure out in clay, I would work out on the canvas,” she recalls, and vice versa. A research project as a McNair Scholar led her to study Rococo-style ceramics and explore China painting on clay. This led to further explorations using clay as a canvas.
Embracing Color
Working for a few years as a floral designer in Kansas City after graduate school, LaVonne loved creating arrangements and being able to work with color and shape. It felt reminiscent of sculpture. She was struck by the range of life experiences where flowers become a means of expression: corsages and boutonnieres for formal dances, and arrangements for weddings, memorials, and celebrations of birth. The addition of flowers in her work serves as what she calls “joyful remembrances.”
For years, LaVonne’s work featured black slip over white clay, sometimes adorned with gold luster. “Gold accents evoke a sense of importance or specialness,” she notes, adding, “It also references gold fillings for teeth or a saintly figure’s halo.” While looking over some of LaVonne’s pieces, a close ceramic artist friend remarked that they lacked the color that typically comes to mind with such celebratory and lively work. For the past few years, she has been incorporating more color into her work, venturing into greens and reds in combination with the black slip.
LaVonne utilizes what she refers to as a “visual library” of images for her narrative surfaces, such as The Diablico Sucio (or Dirty Devils) she vividly remembers seeing on parade as a child in Santiago. These figures, with their colorful masks and red striped attire, often appear in her work alongside tigers, papayas, flowers, and portraits of herself and her family.
The surfaces feel celebratory, much like Panama’s colorful graffitied public transit buses known as Diablo Rojo. As LaVonne reflects, this library of images “is my way of creating a language that speaks to my desire to stay connected to a part of myself and a community that has often felt very far away.” LaVonne enjoys a busy surface. She wants the work to feel like there’s always something to discover, no place for your eye to rest—akin to those Diablo Rojo buses.
Objects as Remembrance
Vessels can serve as symbols of remembrance—in LaVonne’s case, as a keeper of memories and influences as reflected in her narrative surfaces. Or, it could be simply bringing an intention to the making process while she’s pinching the clay that imbues the piece with meaning.
The pots she lives with serve as memorials to people, time, and place, such as her favorite Melissa Weiss breakfast plate. “When I’m using it, I’m back in Kansas City at the Plaza Art Fair. It’s a beautiful day and I’m introducing myself to [Melissa] and kind of nerding out a bit.” While interacting with the pieces she owns made by her late ceramics instructor, Joyce Jablonski, LaVonne is taken back in time to the long driveway leading to Jablonski’s house in the woods. LaVonne can see herself standing in front of the large china cabinet filled with ceramics her teacher had collected throughout her travels.
Though our experiences are temporal, they can be memorialized and fixed in clay. “By bringing these concepts into the home via functional and familiar objects,” reflects LaVonne, “I integrate ideas surrounding mortality and the means through which we are able to mourn, commemorate, and devote space for those we wish to remember.”
Detroit as Inspiration
LaVonne loves Detroit and has established herself there quickly. In 2024, she was the recipient of the Gilda Snowden Emerging Artist Award from Detroit’s Kresge Foundation, and in 2025, she was awarded the prestigious Kresge Artist Fellow in Visual Arts. She teaches ceramics at Detroit’s College for Creative Studies (CCS) and recently acquired studio space in the Eastern Market.
Detroit keeps offering its own inspiration, in particular, the architecture from The Guardian and Fisher Buildings. LaVonne has recently started incorporating the patterns on the buildings’ ceilings on her ceramic surfaces. “There are Aztec Art Deco patterns throughout, but also the tooth and leaf patterns, so it’s been fun to merge these influences.”
Encapsulating memories can be a lighthearted endeavor as well—even a great slice of pizza from Supino’s, her favorite pizza joint in Detroit, can be worth commemorating. “I had some fun making little espresso cups that had some really drippy, cheesy pizza on them,” she notes.
LaVonne is excited for this year’s National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) attendees to experience Detroit, its museums, riverfront, and great food. Her work is on view at multiple NCECA exhibitions, including the all-Latinx exhibit, “Turn Up the Volume,” at the Carr Center; the Wasserman Gallery; Still Life Studios in Ferndale; and the Expo with the Kansas City Urban Potters. She has also curated a show at the Detroit Historical Museum.
the author Susan McHenry, is a studio potter, teacher, and writer living in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She has an MFA in Writing and Literature from Bennington College. To learn more, visit susanmchenryceramics.comor follow on Instagram @susanmchenryceramics.
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The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
Detroit artist Kimberly LaVonne’s ceramic works are a narrative homage to memories from her childhood while living on the United States Army base, Ft. Clayton (now Ciudad del Saber), in Panama. LaVonne’s father was in the military and requested to be stationed in her mother’s native country while LaVonne was young. The family lived there for four years before returning to their home base in St. Robert, Missouri. In the years that followed, they returned to Panama, often for months at a time, allowing LaVonne to feel re-immersed in the culture. Her mother, aunts, and grandmother still live there, and LaVonne recently returned from a visit after a two-year hiatus.
“Growing up in the Midwest with my mother living in Panama, it was and continues to be a struggle to feel a part of this community,” she shares. The focus of LaVonne’s ceramic work, both in form and surface, enables her to stay connected to that community and its vibrant culture. The themes of death and remembrance also factor prominently in LaVonne’s vessels, fueled by a long fascination with the human body and reliquaries. Her works feel like reliquaries themselves, repositories for memory and her heritage.
Human Anatomy as Influence
On a trip to Italy as a graduate student, LaVonne visited La Specola in Florence, the oldest public museum in the world and one of Europe’s oldest natural history museums. She was captivated by the anatomical wax models on display there. These lifelike figures, created by well-known Florentine wax artists of the 17th and 18th centuries, served as teaching aids in the scientific and medical communities, illustrating human anatomy to those without access to a corpse. The anatomical wax Venuses on display made a particular impression upon LaVonne. These female nudes are often in reclining poses with their rib cages and stomachs pulled open to reveal their intestines. LaVonne found beauty in these figures, describing the intestines as “floating out of their body,” and reminiscent of “blooming tea leaves.”
32 As a graduate student at Indiana University, Bloomington, LaVonne was focused on ceramic figurative sculpture—intestinal forms, teeth, and wall hangings of imaginary saints she deemed patrons of various body parts. Turning to medical books on the history of anatomy, conjoined twins, and various medical ailments, she would create collages of what she calls “new anatomy.” These collages became the basis for a three-dimensional life-size series of ceramic intestinal forms that were hung at the abdominal height of the viewer. Working on this series, LaVonne was thinking about the notion of introspection, of “the duality of viscera folded within us, not only as anatomy, but also as the essence of our own being.”
This interest in anatomy is reflected in her current body of work, in which body parts, portraiture, and teeth appear on the narrative surface. Sometimes sculpted teeth are added to works, and other times teeth are carved into the surface of the clay. She adds, “The teeth take on a figurative quality of their own, and they’re also playful. I think of them as little ghosts swimming through the composition.”
A Fascination with Reliquaries
Inspired by the collected works she has seen in museums around the world, LaVonne has reflected a great deal on what those personal collections represent. “There are these small bits of us that get left behind, and there’s something kind of beautiful in that,” she reflects.
Noting that she didn’t grow up in a religious family, LaVonne enjoys the mystery surrounding her fascination with saints. She’s particularly interested in reliquaries: the often ornate containers that store or display the remains of saints and martyrs. Dating back to the Middle Ages, these containers were often covered with narrative scenes depicting the life of the saint whose remains they contained. The remains within might consist of fragments of hair, clothing, shards of bone, or teeth. Prior to 1200 C.E., the containers, often in bust or figure form, were designed to conceal their contents. Later, some reliquaries allowed the contents to be visible, with the relic often on display behind clear glass. “They act as small mementos to the whole and also have a figurative quality of their own,” notes LaVonne.
Making Work that is Personal
In 2020, LaVonne was named an Emerging Artist by Ceramics Monthly, the same year she relocated to Detroit, Michigan. She had planned a trip to visit her mother in Panama when Covid hit. “It felt like the world was on fire,” she recalls. Forced to cancel her trip, she decided to create a ceramic self-portrait. She’s wearing a tiger-patterned skirt known as a saburet, typically worn by the Indigenous Kuna people, that she got in Panama. Looking back, she says, “I think I was just trying to put myself in a place I couldn’t be.” Repeating checked patterns carved into the clay reflected the anxiety LaVonne was feeling at the time and offered a catharsis. This project served as a catalyst for exploring more personal themes in her work that spoke to her desire to stay connected to her Panamanian heritage.
She recalls the lengthy road trips her family would take from the military base to Santiago to visit her grandmother. Those winding roads and rolling hills along the four-hour drive might appear on the surface of her vessels today, while a memorable school field trip to a jungle inspires the native flora and fauna that often appear in her sgraffitoed illustrations. Her mother, aunts, and grandmother— “strong women with strong personalities,” notes LaVonne—also inspire her. She’s curious about how those traits might get passed down in ways that carry some mystery and inform her work in more subtle ways.
Clay as Canvas
LaVonne’s coil- and slab-constructed forms (she rolls large coils and flattens them into thick slabs to build with) often begin with inspiration from Pre-Columbian Coclé pottery and her collection of books on Panamanian ceramics. Not having a fixed plan for the outcome of a piece allows her the freedom to be led intuitively while she’s working.
The forms serve as canvases for layers of drawings and intricate sgraffito carved patterns. Having studied painting along with ceramics as an undergraduate student at the University of Central Missouri, creating imagery on clay came naturally to LaVonne. “What I couldn’t figure out in clay, I would work out on the canvas,” she recalls, and vice versa. A research project as a McNair Scholar led her to study Rococo-style ceramics and explore China painting on clay. This led to further explorations using clay as a canvas.
Embracing Color
Working for a few years as a floral designer in Kansas City after graduate school, LaVonne loved creating arrangements and being able to work with color and shape. It felt reminiscent of sculpture. She was struck by the range of life experiences where flowers become a means of expression: corsages and boutonnieres for formal dances, and arrangements for weddings, memorials, and celebrations of birth. The addition of flowers in her work serves as what she calls “joyful remembrances.”
For years, LaVonne’s work featured black slip over white clay, sometimes adorned with gold luster. “Gold accents evoke a sense of importance or specialness,” she notes, adding, “It also references gold fillings for teeth or a saintly figure’s halo.” While looking over some of LaVonne’s pieces, a close ceramic artist friend remarked that they lacked the color that typically comes to mind with such celebratory and lively work. For the past few years, she has been incorporating more color into her work, venturing into greens and reds in combination with the black slip.
LaVonne utilizes what she refers to as a “visual library” of images for her narrative surfaces, such as The Diablico Sucio (or Dirty Devils) she vividly remembers seeing on parade as a child in Santiago. These figures, with their colorful masks and red striped attire, often appear in her work alongside tigers, papayas, flowers, and portraits of herself and her family.
The surfaces feel celebratory, much like Panama’s colorful graffitied public transit buses known as Diablo Rojo. As LaVonne reflects, this library of images “is my way of creating a language that speaks to my desire to stay connected to a part of myself and a community that has often felt very far away.” LaVonne enjoys a busy surface. She wants the work to feel like there’s always something to discover, no place for your eye to rest—akin to those Diablo Rojo buses.
Objects as Remembrance
Vessels can serve as symbols of remembrance—in LaVonne’s case, as a keeper of memories and influences as reflected in her narrative surfaces. Or, it could be simply bringing an intention to the making process while she’s pinching the clay that imbues the piece with meaning.
The pots she lives with serve as memorials to people, time, and place, such as her favorite Melissa Weiss breakfast plate. “When I’m using it, I’m back in Kansas City at the Plaza Art Fair. It’s a beautiful day and I’m introducing myself to [Melissa] and kind of nerding out a bit.” While interacting with the pieces she owns made by her late ceramics instructor, Joyce Jablonski, LaVonne is taken back in time to the long driveway leading to Jablonski’s house in the woods. LaVonne can see herself standing in front of the large china cabinet filled with ceramics her teacher had collected throughout her travels.
Though our experiences are temporal, they can be memorialized and fixed in clay. “By bringing these concepts into the home via functional and familiar objects,” reflects LaVonne, “I integrate ideas surrounding mortality and the means through which we are able to mourn, commemorate, and devote space for those we wish to remember.”
Detroit as Inspiration
LaVonne loves Detroit and has established herself there quickly. In 2024, she was the recipient of the Gilda Snowden Emerging Artist Award from Detroit’s Kresge Foundation, and in 2025, she was awarded the prestigious Kresge Artist Fellow in Visual Arts. She teaches ceramics at Detroit’s College for Creative Studies (CCS) and recently acquired studio space in the Eastern Market.
Detroit keeps offering its own inspiration, in particular, the architecture from The Guardian and Fisher Buildings. LaVonne has recently started incorporating the patterns on the buildings’ ceilings on her ceramic surfaces. “There are Aztec Art Deco patterns throughout, but also the tooth and leaf patterns, so it’s been fun to merge these influences.”
Encapsulating memories can be a lighthearted endeavor as well—even a great slice of pizza from Supino’s, her favorite pizza joint in Detroit, can be worth commemorating. “I had some fun making little espresso cups that had some really drippy, cheesy pizza on them,” she notes.
LaVonne is excited for this year’s National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) attendees to experience Detroit, its museums, riverfront, and great food. Her work is on view at multiple NCECA exhibitions, including the all-Latinx exhibit, “Turn Up the Volume,” at the Carr Center; the Wasserman Gallery; Still Life Studios in Ferndale; and the Expo with the Kansas City Urban Potters. She has also curated a show at the Detroit Historical Museum.
To learn more about LaVonne’s work, visit kimberlylavonnestudio.com or follow on Instagram @kimberly_lavonne.
the author Susan McHenry, is a studio potter, teacher, and writer living in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She has an MFA in Writing and Literature from Bennington College. To learn more, visit susanmchenryceramics.com or follow on Instagram @susanmchenryceramics.
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