The Brooklyn Rail

What a season for seeing contemporary ceramics in New York. Works by Eiji Uematsu, Edmund de Waal, and Ken Price are all being displayed simultaneously, while Grounded in Clay at the Metropolitan Museum celebrates the history and practice of Pueblo pottery from its origins to the present day. And at Salon 94, Myrtle Williams’s first solo show in New York has immediately added her to this list of masters of the medium.

Spirit of the Sisterhood presents twenty works by Williams on the ground floor of Salon 94’s 89^th Street building, seventeen clustered on low plinths and three hung on the walls. Though made from clay, the works are not necessarily vessels but instead are free-standing sculptures in the round, each depicting a Black woman fully modeled from at least the torso up. Notably, Untitled (ca. 2011) marks an exception in both instances, as the figure is cut off at the legs and possesses a shallow bowl for a head, perhaps like the small Predynastic Egyptian ceramic at the Met, which is all vessel plus two human feet, or the nineteenth century Zulu spoon crafted in the shape of a woman—the bowl of which forms the figure’s head—now at the Louvre. Goddess (Spiritual Heritage) (2011) acts as the exhibition’s sentinel. It is the first sculpture we see and faces outward toward the street. It has the plump dimensions of a Thanksgiving turkey, with pert breasts jutting out, peacock-proud. The figure does not quite look at us, though, so much as beyond us: her head is just slightly tilted, which permits her to peer around us. She is occupied elsewhere, and her ornamentation—including additional heads carved into her chest, a cloth headdress festooned with shells, and delicate dollops of glitter on her lips and nipples—prepares her for her ceremonial role.

As sentry, Goddess also serves to introduce us to the rest of the exhibition. Throughout, we will encounter cloth adornments slung over a shoulder like a stole in Dawn (ca. 2019) or worn like a headdress in Ngozi! (2019), glitter pressed into the clay with a finger, and shells sported as bodily decoration or used to suggest body parts themselves. The green, two-headed Goddess (2010) is a particularly wonderful example: large beads and cowrie shells are wound around the coils of one’s hair with metal thread, while her sister’s hair is actually constructed from the beads and shells. More shells adorn or make up nipples, lips, and fluttering eyelashes. I could have sworn, the day I visited, that I smelled an aromatic essential oil—maybe sandalwood or agarwood—as I walked by Goddess (Spiritual Heritage) (2005) and Goddess Series (2005). The two are positioned back-to-back and each is finished in a wood-brown glaze; their skin is marked with raised and incised patterns that call to mind scarification, and each sculpture’s face and neck are dotted with holes that seem to penetrate all the way through the clay. As such, they appear as though they could be crafted from warm, supple wood themselves or might be censers protecting fragrant cuts of timber.

Throughout the exhibition, Williams’s women pose with their necks elongated and their heads held high. This could read as aloof, but I suspect instead that they are introspective or proud. Williams is building on an important tradition of dignified female figures in African art, and the pursed lips and hand-built nature of Makaa (2016) and Ancient Ancestor (2014) call out to such world-renowned precedents as the ivory Queen Mother masks (Iyoba) or the survival of the remarkable terracotta ancient Yoruba shrine head. The blade-like contours of Ebony (Sisters with an Attitude) (1993) and Goddess Series II (2008) speak to an understanding of African heritage through a modernist lens; those same upturned profiles can be found in Aaron Douglas paintings. The bust form has often been used to portray ancestors—as in ancient Rome—or triumphant heroes. Here, Myrtle Williams takes on the history of African sculpture as well as that of the bust and offers us heroines of her very own.