🎧 Syd Carpenter Earth Offerings: Honoring the Gardeners Kay Whitney

Appears in the March 2023 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.

Syd Carpenter thinks of her work as a signal. As she says, “I use that word a lot; ‘signaling,’ because if you’re looking closely and carefully, the signals are there for you to pick up. I like to provide potent, poignant signals in the work that are not obvious, but that the viewer can find.” Her work is dense with meaning and powerfully grounded in heritage and family. Informed by nature, social histories, and environmental concerns, her objects refer to a range of experiences. She works in response to observations, perceptions, and encounters and is powerfully affected by the senses. Carpenter’s relationship with ceramics is deeply questioning. Her work asks: What do you mean by pottery? Why is that an important subject or issue? How does it play into any broader conversation? Her argument is always that ceramics is foundational in terms of the interpretation of Western cultural history.

Experience and History

Her work begins with imagining shapes and objects in relationship to place. Carpenter’s objects use characteristics of what she’s seen, recreated at a smaller scale—the round volumes of an old washing machine, a wheel, a piece of fence, a root. Her pieces, especially the more abstract ones, involve assemblage. The clay is accompanied by various found objects worked in with the clay structures in order to expand the range of reference. She isn’t interested in replicating a face or a specific place; she’s addressing an experience, not creating a linear narrative.

Carpenter’s work in the Rowan University exhibition, “Earth Offerings: Honoring the Gardeners,” in Glassboro, New Jersey, deals with the legacy of African American farmers and gardeners. More explicitly, her work is a story of the African American connection to the land and its particular relationship to the natural world. This is part of a neglected history; her work both exposes and sheds light on a phenomenon that’s little known and obscure: African American people who own farms or create gardens. 

Carpenter locates herself in her work as an outcome of family experiences and history. Her work reflects a profound connection between sculpture and the art of gardening. Although she is a passionate gardener herself, her deep personal connection to farms and gardens stems from the vegetable garden her grandmother, Indiana Hutson, grew in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during WWII. During that time, Hutson provided for her family of seven children with the produce she grew. It was in the ornamental garden of her mother, Ernestine Carpenter, where Carpenter first experienced the satisfaction of tending the land. Carpenter’s work is also founded on an acknowledgment of a past that recognizes the African Americans coming North during the Great Migration. Carpenter views her work as reaffirming a certain past as well as claiming a certain path. 

Research

In 2012, Carpenter took a road trip, intending to find those who, generations later, were still on Black family farms. She wanted to explore the history of African Americans on the land in this country, beyond the legacy of slavery. As a guide, Carpenter referred to African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South, a book by horticultural scholar Richard Westmacott examining how African Americans have used their gardens and yards in the rural South from the years before the Civil War to the present. She also made contact with individual farm owners after identifying several locations recommended to her by the Southern African American Organic Farmers Network.

Using the book as a guide, Carpenter went to Georgia, South Carolina, and the Gullah Islands. During this trip, she took hundreds of photographs and did many interviews with African American farmers. This activity was used to build an archive, a resource of reference. None of it was intended to make actual portraits of a place. This research became the basis for the series of pieces that most caught my attention, a group Carpenter entitled Farm Bowls; the Rowan University exhibition features seven of them. 

A Testimony to Creativity and Resilience

These stoneware sculptures showcase objects one might see on a farm: eggs and chickens, horses and cows, houses and sheds, swings and fences. Each of these works is named for the garden and farm owners in order to assert and honor their individuality in the face of historical erasure—including people close to her, like her grandmother, and the farmers and families she met. Combining botanical imagery and vernacular forms like clothespins, tools, fences, and sheds, Carpenter’s sculptures offer a testimony to the creativity and resilience of these people by representing in sculpture the importance of African American stewardship of the land.

To make the Farm Bowls series, Carpenter used a stoneware clay, and rather than glazes, she used graphite and watercolor. Making the bowls entails a sequence of handbuilding: the clay sections are thrown and distorted; the oval shape itself slapped over a hump mold, distorted more, and then cut; the rims may be thrown or stretched and attached. The bowl form contains a range of ideas and images—it can be thought of more simplistically in the category of bowl, a thing that offers and receives. But, Carpenter is also thinking of it as a landscape and uses the interior and exterior edges to create a kind of architecture. Ultimately the bowl form is itself a platform that comes already loaded with signifiers. Perhaps the most important of the intended references is the way Carpenter makes these bowls emblematic of the Black presence on the land, a land that offers community, stability, and identity.

Carpenter thinks of clay and the other materials she incorporates as resembling words. She likens her process to putting together a sentence, to composing and articulating. The most striking aspect of her work is the elegant and eloquent way in which it communicates her ideas; every aspect is considered yet appears spontaneous and heartfelt. Her subdued use of color and chosen scale perfectly reflect her intentions. There is no dissonance between the way she speaks about her work and its appearance. It seamlessly and emotionally blends abstraction with historical fact while incorporating Carpenter’s personal connection to that experience.

Carpenter is the subject of a documentary in the Craft in America series which can be seen on PBS’s website (www.pbs.org/craft-in-america/tv-series/home). Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Tang Museum of Art at Skidmore College, the Montreal Museum of Art, the Petrucci Family Collection of African American Art, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute, the National Swedish Museum, and the Everson Museum of Art. She has been a recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts grants, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships, Leeway’s Art and Change Grant, and an Achievement Award. In 2022, she was awarded the Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship. Most recently, she received a 2023 United States Artist fellowship award. 

Carpenter’s current projects include The Crest, a permanent outdoor garden installation that combines horticulture and sculpture. A new garden/sculpture installation is planned for the Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

Carpenter earned her BFA and MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, and until she retired, held the Peggy Chan Professorship in Black Studies at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. 

A hard-copy catalog for Carpenter’s exhibition at Rowan University, including images of additional pieces that were on view, is available (visit sites.rowan.edu/artgallery for more information). 

the author Kay Whitney, a frequent contributor to Ceramics Monthly, is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles, California.