Biography

Breana Hendricks is a Master of Fine Arts candidate in Studio Art at the Ohio State University in Columbus, OH. A ceramic artist from the Bronx, NY, she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the State University of New York at New Paltz. In 2017, Breana was granted the Windgate Fellowship Award, granting the opportunity to travel across the continental United States and Jamaica in order to research the role of pottery in Caribbean history. She travelled to craft communities like Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and Arrowmont School of Crafts to research traditions of utility and continue learning methods and processes in making and decorating pottery. She most recently completed a two-year Westchester Community Foundation’s Young Artist fellowship at Clay Art Center in Portchester, NY teaching afterschool programs, weekend family workshops, and community-building outdoor mosaic programs in various schools and festivals in Westchester, NY. She looks forward to bringing community arts programming though teaching pursuits.

Breana considers the burden of labor when she hand-builds ceramics sculptures inspired by sugar production in colonial Jamaica. Juxtaposing the gravity of displacement with the artificiality of vacationing on an island paradise, she explores the convergence of play and leisure with labor and systemic oppression with multiples of pottery, gestural figural forms, and sugar derived agricultural objects. By traveling, learning, and establishing connections, she hopes her work to activates conversations about the culture of the Black community in the Americas.