CONCORD, MASS.- Lucy Lacoste Gallery is honored to present the ground-breaking group exhibition Evolving Clay: Where Tradition Meets Transformation, up through April 18, 2026 in Concord Massachusetts. Evolving Clay invites viewers into a space where ancient material meets contemporary art for radical storytelling and cultural reclamation. Curated by ceramist and professor Michael Dela Dika of Ghana, in collaboration with Lucy Lacoste Gallery, the exhibition traces clay's expansive journey from its utilitarian roots to its reimagining as a vehicle for political commentary and spiritual depth.



Clay’s responsiveness—its ability to be formed, broken, and repaired—mirrors the migrations and diasporas that shape many of these artists’ lives and practices. In this way, Evolving Clay becomes an aesthetic exploration and a conceptual inquiry into how we remember, resist, and rebuild through material. From raw earth to refined form, the works on view reflect clay’s unique power to embody contradiction: fragile yet durable, rooted yet mobile, ancient yet urgent.



Uniting thirteen unique artists under Dika’s thoughtful curation, this exhibition brings together a multigenerational, multicultural roster of artists who shape, fire, and transform clay into more than mere objects. Featuring works by Roberto Lugo, Paul S. Briggs, Murjoni Merriweather, Larry Ossei-Mensah and Eugene Ofori Agyei, among others, the show crosses the boundaries between craft and sculpture, function and symbolism, memory and invention.



Lugo remixes traditional pottery forms with hip-hop iconography and social critique, while Briggs’s sculptures of knots and chains speak to themes of social justice. Murjoni Merriweather celebrates Blackness through figurative forms. At the same time, Ossei-Mensah expands his curatorial practice into the material realm, using clay to consider questions of Black identity and cultural hybridity. Rising stars such as Isaac Scott, Raelis Vasquez, Audrey An, Josephine Larsen, and Gerald Brown explore clay not just as a material, but as a carrier of narrative, imbued with personal lineage, communal struggle, and the tactile weight of history.



Participating Artists:

Eugene Ofori Agyei
Audrey An
Paul S. Briggs
Gerald Brown
Michael Dela Dika
Josephine Larsen
Roberto Lugo
Murjoni Merriweather
Janina Myronova
Teddy Osei
Larry Ossei-Mensah
Isaac Scott
Raelis Vasquez



Ultimately, Evolving Clay proposes clay as both medium and metaphor—a connective tissue across geographies and generations. In the hands of these artists, it becomes a site of transformation, where tradition is not preserved in amber but reshaped in the fire of lived experience.