After the Island brings four Caribbean Canadian ceramic artists to Toronto’s Gardiner Museum

Official exhibition image for After the Island: Caribbean Canadian Ceramics, opening Oct. 9 at Toronto’s Gardiner Museum.

Photo credit: Gardiner Museum

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Toronto’s Gardiner Museum opens After the Island: Caribbean Canadian Ceramics on Oct. 9, bringing together work by PJ Anderson, Eddy Firmin, Manuel Mathieu and Sharon Norwood. The exhibition, organized with Black Artists’ Networks in Dialogue (BAND) and San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora, runs through April 25, 2027.

The museum’s free public opening on Oct. 8, from 7:30 to 9 p.m., is now sold out. A ticketed artist panel on Oct. 9 remains open, giving visitors a second opening-week event tied directly to the exhibition.

Co-curated by Dr. Sequoia Miller, the Gardiner’s Chief Curator and Deputy Director, and Joséphine Denis, Co-Director and Director of Curatorial Initiatives at BAND, After the Island connects ceramic practice to migration and memory, including questions of labour, ancestry, identity and belonging. The artists also work beyond conventional ceramic forms, incorporating installation, painting, scent and an interactive video game.

Anderson is identified by the Gardiner as Jamaican Canadian and Red River Métis and is from Thompson, Manitoba. Her practice draws on coiling and burnishing traditions she studied with ceramic practitioners in South Africa and the American Southwest, alongside her Afro-Jamaican and Red River Métis heritage. Firmin, who was born in Guadeloupe and now works between Montreal and Halifax, uses ceramics alongside other media to examine colonial legacies, including histories of indentured labour.

Mathieu is a Haitian multidisciplinary artist based in Montreal whose work in the exhibition uses ceramics, scent and mixed media around memory and ritual. Norwood, who was born in Jamaica, works across media and has repeatedly used a curly-line motif in work addressing race, labour, identity and historical narratives.

“Clay is an incredibly powerful material for thinking about what our bodies inherit and carry forward,” Denis said in the Gardiner’s exhibition announcement.

The Toronto exhibition is part of a cross-border collaboration among the Gardiner, BAND and the Museum of the African Diaspora. MoAD’s related San Francisco exhibition, After the Island: Ornament and Ceramic Practice in the Jamaican Diaspora, runs from Sept. 30, 2026 to May 30, 2027 and includes Anderson and Norwood alongside Jacqueline Bishop. The two exhibitions are distinct projects connected through the broader partnership.

The Oct. 9 artist panel runs from 6 to 8 p.m., with doors opening at 5:30 p.m. Anderson, Firmin, Mathieu and Norwood are scheduled to appear, with Denis and Miller moderating and a Q&A to follow. Tickets are listed at $18 for general admission and $15 for Gardiner Friends, and the exhibition will remain open until 8 p.m. that evening.

After the Island: Caribbean Canadian Ceramics continues at the Gardiner Museum through April 25, 2027. Regular museum admission applies, and the Gardiner advises visitors that some works in the exhibition contain scent.

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