Pattern is language.
Surface is memory.
Space is legacy.
My work spans ceramic tile installations, public art, collectible objects, moving image, and works on paper, currently drawing from African writing systems, Caribbean textile heritage, and my Caribbean family photo archives — each piece an act of archive-building that holds memory, asserts identity, and reclaims space.
EXHIBITIONS
CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
Houston Center for Contemporary Craft
Houston, TX
August 1, 2026 — July 3, 2027
Residence 19th Edition
-
This annual exhibition celebrates the Center’s Artist Residency Program, which has supported artists working in the field of craft for 25 years. The show features works in fiber, clay, photography, and mixed media by 2025-2026 resident artists Malene Djenaba Barnett, Roslyn Dupré, Candace Hicks, Katie Mongoven, Lorena Morales, Dominique Muñoz, Kendall Ross, and Grace Sachi Troxell.
The Artist Residency Program at HCCC provides local, regional, and international artists with a space for creative exploration, exchange, and collaboration with other artists, arts professionals, and the public. HCCC Curatorial Fellow Zaynab Hilal notes, “With each iteration of In Residence, it is exciting to see how each artist’s practice develops over the course of the residency and how their work as a collective cohort informs and influences each other. The works on view explore expanded conceptions of materiality, identity, and storytelling, with specific pieces touching on grief, home, and reclamation.”
In Residence: 19th Edition was curated by HCCC Curatorial Fellow, Zaynab Hilal.
Maritime Museum Maine,
Portland, ME
November 15, 2025-2027
Re | Sounding
-
Re|Sounding stems from the maritime process of “sounding,” or measuring depth beneath a vessel as a form of navigation. With this exhibit, Maine Maritime Museum is dedicated to re-measuring our institutional understanding of Maine’s maritime history by centering Indigenous and Black perspectives. Directed by a group of humanities scholars and community leaders in collaboration with museum curators, this exhibit will examine Wabanaki and Black maritime history and culture. With a humble acknowledgment of work that lies ahead, Re|Sounding also marks a moment of institutional reflection and a commitment to responsibly and inclusively collecting, exhibiting, and sharing Maine’s maritime stories.
Recently uncovered archival documents will provide insight into undertold stories of the state’s Indigenous and Black maritime communities, celebrating resilience and tradition while shedding light on a global history of colonization and enslavement. The exhibit will feature both historic artifacts and artworks of contemporary Wabanaki and Black artists to deliberately invite dialogue on the ways history continues to shape the present, prompting visitors to imagine futures founded on equity and freedom.Duis venenatis neque eget sapien finibus efficitur. Sed feugiat suscipit pulvinar. Suspendisse eleifend lacus quis justo dictum, in facilisis dolor rutrum. Nulla facilisi. Integer lacus enim, sagittis id lacus a, mattis commodo lacus. Praesent lobortis, orci eu tempus gravida, tortor mi mattis dolor, vitae ornare ipsum metus id orci. Ut vel est sodales, accumsan augue et, malesuada nisi. Cras lobortis nec neque quis fermentum. Praesent eleifend, erat a posuere lobortis, erat leo rhoncus nulla, id aliquet quam urna sit amet nibh. Integer ornare elementum sem, et laoreet libero tempus ut. Ut quis turpis metus. Duis in nisl in velit imperdiet accumsan.
PAST EXHIBITIONS
-
Wasserman Project,
Detroit, MI
Absence Takes Form explores how artists express their individual diasporic journeys in clay, taking its inspiration from Detroit, a place with a rich history shaped by the Great Migration. All diaspora and migrations are complex negotiations between gain and loss, defined by displacement, memory, and promise. These formative life experiences can offer fertile inspiration to artists, and the works in this exhibition give voice and physical space to ancestral memories by turning absence into a three-dimensional form. This reparative work is expressed in myriad ways, including acknowledging a life lived, embracing visual signifiers of one’s identity, honoring and preserving cultural techniques and traditions, and engaging in a conceptual practice that reconstructs the past anew. In this exhibition, artists engage in the act of processing their memory of an ancestral homeland through creation. Absence takes form.Curator Adrienne Spinozzi, Associate Curator in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum
Photography by PD Rearick. Courtesy of Wasserman Projects
-
Cooper Hewitt Museum
New York, NYAn exhibition space in the Smithsonian Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt Museum. The Underground Library is a reservoir of narratives and imagery, a refuge for those seeking freedom through the power of artistic literacy and personal expression. Like a modern-day Underground Railroad, it guides readers through layered stories, coded symbols, and visual archives—each holding keys to understanding and self-discovery.
It encourages the building of one’s own library, inspiring each of us to create a sanctuary for those willing to journey beyond the surface, to explore tales woven with complexity and truth. Within its depths, knowledge becomes a quiet rebellion, and art becomes a pathway to liberation.
-
Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA
An exhibition that features designs, artworks, and environments dedicated to the global necessity for Black people to cultivate domestic interiors not only as spaces of revolutionary action, but also of radical joy and revolutionary rest. Conceptually, Liberatory Living evokes bell hooks’ concept of “Homeplace,” or those concrete spaces which inspire that [particular] feeling of safety, arrival, and homecoming—reminiscent of the warmth and belonging she experienced at her grandmother's home.
In tandem, Elizabeth Alexander's notion of the "Black interior" unfolds as a space of unlimited imagination—a "Black imaginary" that challenges us to envision what we are not meant to envision and captures themes society often overlooks including complex Black identities; genuine and actionable Black empowerment; and rampant and unfetishized Black beauty.
-
Kingston Jamaica
The exhibition Kingston Biennial 2024: Green X Gold revolves around land, environment and ecology, taking inspiration from themes of the Jamaican flag. It also plays on the constructed depiction of Jamaica and the Caribbean as “paradise”, which is seen largely in tourism marketing, and contrasts it with ecological realities that are less publicised
-
Bemis Center
Omaha, NENEO-CUSTODIANS: WOVEN NARRATIVES OF HERITAGE, CULTURAL MEMORY AND BELONGING focuses on the historical aspect of textiles as a vehicle for communication and representation. Linking this ancient form of expression to contemporary artworks inspired by this legacy, the thirteen artists in the exhibition engage intentionally with materials bearing complex histories. Offering unique perspectives that examine concepts around migration, identity, and environmental sustainability, these artists revisit history through the deconstruction of the canon. Reviewing personal and socio-political histories, as well as world events of the past through the lens of their diverse practices, they create a reconfiguration of ideas that births something new, centered on the regenerative properties of fibers.
Through their evocative works, each artist embarks on a journey of uncovering. In doing so, they carve out a space for both unearthing and rewriting narratives, acting as custodians of stories which are often buried or uncelebrated. Their deliberate manipulation challenges tradition, and forges new pathways of understanding. Collectively, the works create a contemplative space–– one that encourages a thorough reflection on the past in order to gain a better understanding of the present, and how both coalesce to shape the future.
Exhibiting artists include El Anatsui, Malene Barnett, Layo Bright, Celeste Butler, Sanaa Gateja, Enam Gbewonyo, Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga, Seydou Keita, Ron Norsworthy, Nnenna Okore, Patrick Quarm, Latrelle Rostant, and Yinka Shonibare.
-
New York, NY
Sugar Hill MuseumWorking across media, from paper, ceramics, and mixed-media installation to photography, these eight women artists can be linked by their engagement with processes of play and material exploration. Often beginning with formal structures, be they geometric, architectural, or linguistic, the artists introduce elements of the crafted and the hand-made to produce energies that ultimately overspill these underlying frameworks; valuing process, their work allows us to see the exploration and craft of their art as part of its function and meaning. The eight artists in Structural Play produce work that in varying ways exceeds formal limits, engaging with the dynamics of play to create new models for how to view and comprehend the world around us.
-
Miami, FL
Wexler’s Design Miami presentation celebrates the deep personal bonds between each artist and their respective home countries, while giving Barnett, Tariku, Kemahlioglu and Rusu agency to cultivate fresh applications steeped in tradition.
Malene Djenaba (Jen-nah-ba) Barnett’s debut showing with Wexler Gallery includes a transcendent terracotta tile installation called “Memories of Home,” that draws inspiration from her African Caribbean heritage and uses cultural memory to reconnect to mark-making in West African mud architecture.
-
New York City
The Jane Hartsook Gallery is pleased to present work by our 2018-2019 fellows and artists in residence: Malene Barnett, Sindy Butz, Donna Green, Phoenix Lindsey-Hall, and Kari Marboe. The Greenwich House Pottery Residency and Fellowship is a distinguished program that fosters artistic growth by providing artists with a creative community, time, space and materials to explore and generate new bodies of ceramic work in the center of the art world.
-
Philadelphia, PA
WE CALLED HER MOM honors the first Black woman maker in my life; my maternal grandmother. Her name was Linda London, but we called her Mom. Mom was born in 1919 in Guyana, grew up in St. Vincent in the Caribbean, and died at age 54. She was a dressmaker, entrepreneur, and mother who sacrificed her well-being to pursue a better life in America for herself and her family. Through gathering fragments of intimate family histories consisting of photographs, oral stories, and my imagination -- my work is a reinvention of self and archival practices through the hands of Black women makers. Drawing from Map to the Door of No Return, Dionne Brand writes, "To live in the Black diaspora is I think to live as a fiction--a creation of empires, and also self-creation. It is to be a being living inside and outside herself. It is to apprehend the sign one makes yet unable to escape it except in radiant moments of ordinariness made like art." My self-creation began by tracing my heritage through DNA composites and comprehending the Black diaspora's creation in the Caribbean through the lens of Black women makers. The results brought me to Nigeria, Jamaica, St. Vincent, and the United States. I focused on each locale's makers, their textile and pottery histories, and the communities that fought for liberation against all forms of oppression. I constantly grappled with a traumatic and painful past, the limitations of both historical and family archives, and a constant reinvention of self. My work reimagined these absences to create beautiful objects holding joyful memories from ancestral pottery and textiles traditions brought to the Caribbean from West Africa. My focal point is four generations of women within my family: my great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, and myself. In each repetitive process and imagery, my work gives voice to the diversity of the diaspora, connecting the Caribbean to America.
In creating an archival practice through making, this work honors the souls of the named and nameless: a tribute to those who courageously pursued Black Life. Each object is a gift to the ancestors and an investment in Black archival futures. Shards of pottery will no longer be the primary source of our histories but rather the community's objects, documentation, and care.
-
Miami Florida
The Universe within the Universe Within is not a definitive statement on who women-identifying and non-binary people of the Black diaspora are. Instead, it is a space that recognizes their limitless potential to be. Layered, dynamic, complex, nuanced, ever-evolving. A multitude of selves within the vessel of their bodies. Like our universe, mysterious and mystical, their interiority is rich and vast. This exhibition is a privileged glimpse into the wondrous multiformity within the spectrum of Black femininity and queerness. Extending over three rooms, eleven artists take up space, an understated form of resistance. Recurrent themes surveyed in the exhibition include the relationship between self and place, nurturing individual and collective identity, transformation, celebration, survival, ancestral lineages, navigating the problematic expectations and violence imposed on their bodies, and the importance of reclaiming childhood. The artists of The Universe Within use clay as their primary vehicle for storytelling. An ancient and elemental medium, long marginalized in the art world. Parallelly, the field of studio ceramics has notoriously underrepresented Black artists for decades, especially those who are women-identifying and non-binary. However, the sculptures and vessels, both abstract and figurative, created by the artists of The Universe Within demonstrate that clay—which is capable of impressive transfiguration—is an effective tool for empowering their narratives in their quest for liberation, connection, and beauty.
Visit theUniverse Within
-
Philadelphia
In creating an archival practice through making, this work honors the souls of the named and nameless: a tribute to those who courageously pursued Black Life. Each object is a gift to the ancestors and an investment in Black archival futures. Shards of pottery will no longer be the primary source of our histories but rather the community's objects, documentation, and care.
Additional Exhibitions
African American Museum of Dallas
Chicago Museum of Science and Technology
New Orleans Craft Identities Museum
Texas Contemporary