All My Relations II

Ebitenyefa Baralaye is an ceramicist, sculptor, designer, and educator. His work explores cultural, spiritual, and material translations of objects, text, and symbols interpreted through a diaspora lens and abstracted around the aesthetics of craft and design. He received a BFA in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2006 before attending Cranbrook Academy of Art, earning his MFA in 2016.

The title of Baralaye’s piece All My Relation: II is a quote from Dave Drake, an enslaved nineteenth-century South Carolinian potter. This work is indicative of a recent series of works by the artist featuring larger-than-life, black, glazed stoneware heads with facial features outlined by fluid clay lines. A sense of bond, kinship, and place is the absent-but-longed-for quality in Baralaye’s researched homage to Drake, whose objects and the poetic lines often inscribed on them were a defiant act of individual expression in an racist era that dehumanized Black persons and placed prohibitions on literacy in the Black community. All My Relation: II features abstracted eyes, ears, noses, and mouths a gathering of the parts of fragmented individuals into a collective presence. This assemblage of human forms can be read as those souls cast adrift in the horrific diaspora of the Atlantic slave trade, which saw millions of lives uprooted on the African continent and all their relations over the course of hundreds of years kept forcibly apart.

Baralaye has exhibited his work widely. He was featured in the Objects: USA 2020 exhibition and catalog and he was previously an AICAD fellow at the San Francisco Art Institute from 2016–2018. He is currently an Assistant Professor and the Section Lead of Ceramics at the College for Creative Studies.

Andrew Satake Blauvelt
Director
Cranbrook Art Museum
December 2023

Kat Goffnett
Assistant Curator of Collections
Cranbrook Art Museum
December 2023