Heirlooms and communal ancestry: The ceramics of Chotsani Elaine Dean
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Standing in her Minneapolis studio, artist Chotsani Elaine Dean picks up an antique glass bottle. Examining the amber vessel, she runs her fingers across its raised Clorox letters, then sets it down among a dozen more. She calls them her new obsession.
“I would say the bleach bottles scare me the most,” she says.
The University of Minnesota associate professor of ceramics shares several reasons for this. While most of her ceramic work gleams in earth tone glazes, Dean has recast these bleach bottles in bright blue and white, a sort of pop art twist on Delft pottery.
The new series, called “Luminol,” will be on view for a group exhibition “Ebb/Flow,” which opens Dec. 17 at the Weisman Art Museum. Weisman senior curator Diane Mullin chose to feature Dean in the show because her work challenges traditional notions of studio ceramics, and crosses boundaries into the conceptual and political.
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“So, this is how I describe Chotsani’s work: Very overwhelming, but in a very quiet way,” Mullin says.
Dean uses ceramics to reimagine domestic objects — like the bleach bottles, and cotton, spoons and quilts — that probe histories of slavery, abolition and labor.
“I'm trying to create my own heirlooms,” she says.
The bleach bottles are not just some found object. For Dean, who collected her first one in 2000, they are freighted with meaning that has grown and continues to change over time.
“The bottle really came into play too, because of the pandemic. You know, thinking about disinfecting. It kills 99 percent,” she says. “How come not everything?
The bleach bottles are also reconnected Dean to her time in India as a Fulbright scholar. In 2012, she traveled there for nine months to investigate the connections between cotton plantations in the Southern U.S. and the cotton and tea plantations of India. She recalls often seeing advertisements for skin lightening.
“I was asked several times if I wanted my skin lightened, which involves a bleaching process,” Dean says. “Until that moment, I perceived myself as an outsider, but then them asking me shows I'm inside.”
Dean pats her arm.
“This connects us, but I'm aware that I'm not Indian,” she says. “But then, they're connecting me by the concerns of my skin color and what that projects.”
Dean says the main driver of her work is investigating what she calls her “communal ancestry.” She is from Hartford, Connecticut, or what she identifies as a trading post established by the Dutch in the early 17th-century.
She links this heritage with the participation of the Dutch in the transatlantic slave trade, and to the American abolitionist Sojourner Truth, whose first language was a Dutch dialect.
In 2019, a year before relocating to Minnesota to teach, Dean curated the exhibition “Trading Post: Exchange and Sojourn,” which ran at the Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis.
“That was one of the most welcoming experiences I've ever had,” Dean says of collaborating with the center. “That's a relationship that really connected me to Minneapolis before anything.” She is now a member of its artist advisory committee.
The group exhibition featured some of Dean’s items inspired by Sojourner Truth; paying tribute by using Dutch words on objects like her “memory spoons” and “plantation sugar jars.”
Cotton appears in newer work, too. She grows it herself, or least she did before moving to Minnesota from the South, where she had been teaching at the South Carolina School of the Arts. She's had trouble cultivating it in Minnesota.
“Growing the cotton was my own act of protest,” she says, outlining how it was once a U.S. commodity mostly grown by people who were enslaved. “I don't have any connection to this thing I'm reading about and talking about. So, I just had to grow it.”
In the Weisman exhibition, her cotton can be seen floating, with other plants she’s grown, in a resin bubble placed on a reimagined antique mirror. Tufts are also piled into stoneware “memory baskets."
For Dean, cotton also links directly as a material for quilts, which have been an area of her research since graduate school.
Then, she was discovering the work of textile artists like Gladys Marie Frye. She learned how many European-looking quilts had in fact been made by enslaved and emancipated African American women. Many would then collect fabric scraps to create their own designs to be passed down.
“In my work, I make functional pieces and I make nonfunctional pieces, but I'm in the 21st century, I have that luxury. You know, they didn't have that,” Dean says. “Quilts have that duality. They are looked at as purely decorative. They can carry on as an heirloom, something that's passed down. They hold time in a way. But then they also are just practical. They will keep you warm.”
Dean makes ceramic quilts, created by a patchwork of tiles, etched with names, Dutch phrases, dates and land coordinates. Standing in the Weisman Gallery, Dean indicates one of these quilts already hanging on the wall.
One section tells the story of Celia, a 19th century enslaved woman in Missouri who was tried for the murder of her enslaver.
“This is the first day of her court trial, and this is the last day of it where she was found guilty,” she says, pointing. “That's the coordinates for the Fulton Courthouse, where it took place.”
Mullin says the Weisman is in discussions to acquire Dean’s quilt for its own collection. While the exhibition opens Dec. 17, it runs through 2023, and Mullin says they are still developing interactive programming to engage with the work and research of Dean and the other participating artists. The show marks the reopening of the museum’s Hodroff ceramic gallery, and a rethinking of their American art and ceramics collection.
“We have a very small percentage of African Americans in our so-called American art collection,” Mullin says. “I want to make sure to recognize that this is an intentional correction of something that's missing.”
While creating the artwork in this exhibition, Dean has also been working on a book project with her co-author donald a clark. In November, they published “Contemporary Black American Ceramic Artists,” which features dozens of living artists, including Dean, as well as some from the past.
“It needed to have this balance in context of a then and a now—artists who are no longer with us to show that there's a continuum,” she says. “This isn't just, like, look at Black ceramic artists now, but they've been here, and to really stretch out and give more context to their stories, too.”
To Dean’s knowledge, there has never been a book survey like this before.
The book inspired “A Gathering: Works from ‘Contemporary Black American Ceramic Artists,’” a complementary exhibition at the Northern Clay Center, which was on view earlier this fall.
“This is a watershed publication that we will look back on as a community as the book that changed the ceramic field from one that traditionally recognizes the contributions of mostly white artists — specifically men — to a far more representative and inclusive one that respects the contributions, history and talents of Black American ceramic artists,” says Tippy Maurant, the gallery director at the Northern Clay Center.
Dean says she chose to exhibit at the center again not only because of her established relationship, but also because its proximity to the police killing of George Floyd and the ensuing uprising.
Maurant says Dean has demonstrated a passion for creating community around her projects: “In my observation, for Chotsani, the magic is in collaboration as much as it is in the clay itself.”
Dean says the exhibition was her way of giving back to the community after two years of feeling like she couldn’t make a difference in the aftermath of Floyd’s death.
“I'm not a protester. I can't organize things,” Dean says. “That's how I felt I could bring something good to the area.”
The “A Gathering” exhibition is slated to travel to California and Massachusetts in 2023.
Correction (Dec. 12, 2022): A previous version of this story incorrectly spelled the last name of the Weisman senior curator. This has been fixed.
