🎧 Winnie Owens-Hart: To Never Forget Glen R. Brown

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.

The diverse works of ceramic artist Winnie Owens-Hart reflect an inclination to employ clay as a repository of tradition, history, and memory. Three corresponding fields of inquiry are implicit. First, the work is ethnographic, conserving in its features both technical and aesthetic aspects of West African ceramic traditions that are on the verge of dying out. Years of apprenticeship with local potters in Nigeria and Ghana have given Owens-Hart greater hands-on knowledge of ceramic practices in those contexts than is typically acquired by anthropologists. Second, her work addresses African American history, preserving in its imagery knowledge of a past that a growing wave of authoritarianism and state censorship now seeks to wipe from American consciousness. Owens-Hart’s works admonish the nation to never forget the factor of race in the historical origins of the culture wars that are once more ripping it apart. Third, her work reflects on psychological states, recording emotional experiences of an individual whose existence is, by nature, finite. In the medium of memory, aspects of history and tradition merge. To each of these forms of inquiry and preservation, there is a sense of necessity, even urgency. The result is that Owens-Hart’s works, despite their diverse imagery and themes, converge on an imperative of remembrance.

Remembrance and Resilience

Remembering can be painful, even as it affirms core values of identity. As a child in Virginia in the 1950s, Owens-Hart attended segregated grade schools and was prohibited from swimming in the neighborhood pool. Brown v. Board of Education may have abruptly changed laws, but the consequences of that monumental case could not so immediately change attitudes. When Owens-Hart joined the swim team as one of only a handful of Black students at a formerly all-white public high school, the pool emptied as she entered. Her response—an unsinkable, “Thanks! I’ve got the whole pool to myself!”—encapsulates her resilience, a character trait she credits to the affirming aspects of her community, church, and, above all, parents. It was in the family home that an encyclopedia turned her interest in ancestral roots into a curiosity about African pottery that would lead her to undergraduate study at The Philadelphia College of Art (now The University of the Arts) and graduate study at Howard University, where she later taught for 37 years as a professor.

At the Philadelphia College of Art, frustrated by a curriculum that acknowledged little precedent for ceramics outside of Asia and Europe, Owens-Hart determined to explore beyond those boundaries. “My mission back then, in my early 20s, was to visit every country on the African continent,” she recalls, “then bring all the information back, and let them know there was something in ceramics beyond Asian art and Wedgwood.” In 1977 an opportunity to begin that ambitious project in Nigeria came by benefit of the Festival of African Culture (FESTAC). The following year, with the aid of a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant, she returned to Nigeria to study traditional pottery making in the village of Ipetumodu. 

Traditional Techniques

As an apprentice, Owens-Hart learned a traditional potting technique, practiced by women for generations, that involved walking clay into “thick pancakes,” draping these over communal hump molds sprinkled with ash, and pounding the clay with a stone to thin the walls. After removing the clay forms from the molds and allowing them to stiffen for half a day in the sun, the potters inverted them, set them into depressions scooped in the sand, and built the upper parts of the vessels by adding coils to the molded bases. “I was an odd apprentice,” Owens-Hart recalls, “because normally you start as a child on your mother’s back, learning the techniques and making all the movements in the air. I was the odd woman out, but after some years, they understood that I was just as committed, and I was taken in as one of the potters.”

Since the 1970s, Owens-Hart has taught the Ipetumodu potting technique and employed it to produce many of her globular, flaring-necked vessels. More recently, she has also practiced a different technique learned in the village of Kuli, Ghana, where she has spent time annually for more than a decade. “There’s no mold,” she explains, “the lip is made first—a round ring of wet clay. That ring is stuffed with wet clay, then it is allowed to stiffen, out of the sun, until the next day. The stiffened pot is perched upon our knees, and the opening faces the potter. The left hand supports the outside damp bottom of the pot while the right hand simultaneously rotates as it punches the center into a round-bottom pot. So these were two different techniques, in Nigeria and Ghana. I got smart and realized that I wasn’t going to get to every country, so I concentrated on those traditions.”

Owens-Hart’s own pottery reflects her West African apprenticeships. Apart from taking shapes derived from Ipetumodu or Kuli forming techniques, some vessels bear the distinctive evidence of smoke firing. At the same time, she has always incorporated her own interpretations of tradition. For a period, many pots were adorned with images of geckos, some luted onto smooth vessel walls as raised silhouettes. While these suggest inspiration in West African imagery, Owens-Hart has scrupulously avoided appropriating symbols, especially of a spiritual nature. Geckos were simply an interesting motif (though now, she remarks, “I live with them and I hate them!”). Another decorative element has been more long-lived. On the shoulders of her vessels she has frequently carved or articulated in dots of underglaze and luster references to necklaces. These details, indicative of anthropomorphism, implicitly engender the pots. 

Sobering Reflections

The feminine character of Owens-Hart’s pottery has been explicit in a long-running series of vessels titled Little Women. In these works, often presented in groups, vessel necks and bodies are analogous to human anatomy. Breasts, navels, and vulvae are indicated in relief. What might at first seem purely sensual abstractions of the human form are in fact sobering reflections on the female genital mutilation still practiced in some parts of the world. The vessels of the series range in size, the smallest, emblematizing vulnerability, being only two inches tall. “I’ll stop making them when they stop mutilating women,” Owens-Hart states, “but they’re about more than that. In some cases they’re engineered so that if you push them just a little, they rock. Women rock their babies to soothe them, and they rock their bodies when they’re mourning. They’re about things women do globally.”

More specific is Owens-Hart’s ongoing series African American Women. Here, the works express wide-ranging connections to tradition, history, and memory—the latter being in essence Owens-Hart’s emotional relationship to tradition and history. The works are diverse in form and theme, but generally feature large, partial figures. Some, such as Katrina is the Shame of America (a reference to the federal government’s response to the devastating 2005 hurricane), relate to specific historical events; others, metaphorical in nature, reflect on more general experience. For example, Wade in the Water #1 and #2, large figures produced during Owens-Hart’s 2015 John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Arts/Industry residency, stand in pools of cast-tile waters, eyes closed and minds serenely self-sufficient. 

Related to these sculptures is a series of mask forms. Some, such as Scream . . . You’re Black and in America, indict the nation’s tradition of racism, overtly resurgent in recent years as evidenced by examples from state-sponsored disenfranchisement of Black voters to the massacre of shoppers at a Buffalo supermarket by a gunman under the influence of “replacement theory.” Many Americans have had the luxury of being shocked by the realization that the civil rights movement half a century ago only forced racial bigotry temporarily into the shadows. Owens-Hart has never been thus deceived. Life’s a Beach . . . Howard Beach, depicting a face of torment below an implicit nightmare of a Black man pursued by a car with Jurassic jaws, draws upon memory. “My Auntie lived in Brooklyn, and we had an emergency,” she explains. “We ended up lost in a place called Howard Beach, and the people were . . . not nice.” Shortly after, learning of the notorious incident in which 23-year-old Michael Griffith had been beaten then struck by a car and killed while fleeing three white teenagers, she reflected in horror, “We were just there. They could have done that to us.”

Fears of ending up as a news story later became all too real when Owens-Hart was herself targeted in an ongoing incident of racial harassment, punctuated by hate symbols and death threats, that drew the attention of national media. The sculptural vessel Never Forget, perhaps the most powerful personal expression of her 50-year career, encapsulates memories of emotional experiences that cannot be erased. Its circle of lynched bodies—silent references to American atrocities from the Tulsa Race Massacre to the murder of Ahmaud Arbery almost a century later—blend history, nefarious tradition, and the psychology of personal memory in ominous warning. For now, at least, American art retains the right to preserve such content against a growing authoritarianism that would repress it. Art still speaks and encourages discourse. “My voice was heard,” Owens-Hart wrote in a contemplative moment. “What does my work change? . . . It touches enough people to begin an exchange of their voices.”

Winnie Owens-Hart is the recipient of a 2023 United States Artist fellowship award. She is currently writing a book on the history of African American ceramics and welcomes input from the community. Learn more at www.africancraftstravel.com. 

the author Glen R. Brown is a professor of art history at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.