Evolving Clay: Where Tradition Meets Transformation

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

PRESS RELEASE

Evolving Clay: Where Tradition Meets Transformation
Curated by Michael Dika

March 21 - April 18, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday March 21, 4-6 pm
Followed by Artist Talk: Saturday March 21, 6:00 pm

Lucy Lacoste Gallery is honored to present the ground-breaking group exhibition Evolving Clay: Where Tradition Meets Transformation, March 21 to April 18, 2026 in Concord Massachusetts. Evolving Clay invites viewers into a space where ancient material meets contemporary urgency. Curated by ceramist Michael Dika in collaboration with Lucy Lacoste Gallery, the exhibition traces clay's expansive journey from its utilitarian roots to its reimagining as a vehicle for radical storytelling and cultural reclamation.

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 Briggs, Murjoni Merriweather, Larry Ossei-Mensah and Eugene Ofori Agyei, among others, the show blurs the boundaries between craft and sculpture, function and symbolism, memory and invention. Each artist engages the medium not just as a material, but as a carrier of narrative, imbued with personal lineage, communal struggle, and the tactile weight of history.

In Lugo’s remix of traditional pottery forms with hip-hop iconography and social critique, or Briggs’s sculptures of knots and chains to speak of social justice, clay becomes a vessel for political commentary and spiritual depth. Michael Dika’s work explores ancestral resonance through form. 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.

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 Claybecomes 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.

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.

Uniting thirteen accomplished artists under Dika’s thoughtful curation, Evolving Clay is indeed a historic exhibition. It involves various established artists such as Roberto Lugo, who now has a room at the Met, and Larry Ossei-Mensah, curator and co-founder of ARTNOIR, as well as multiple rising stars such as Isaac Scott, Raelis Vasquez, Audrey An, Eugene Ofori-Agyei, and Gerald Brown. This show has international reach by including artists from Ghana, Ukraine, Denmark, South Korea, the Dominican Republic, and more.

We invite you to celebrate and be part of this transformative exhibition.

For high-resolution images and press inquiries, please contact info@lucylacoste.com.

Michael Dika Bio

Bios of Lugo, Merriweather, Briggs, and Ossei-Mensah

Bios of Scott, Myronova, Brown, and Ofori Agyei

Bios of Osei, Larsen, An, and Vasquez

Curated by Michael Dika

March 21 – April 18, 2026

Press Release