Power In Simplicity

Batiste views the through line of her various jobs and roles as distilling complex ideas into accessible, memorable forms. She did that with sour, hot, bitter, and sweet (2022), a set of 4-inch porcelain bowls installed on a flat cedar plinth that follows a Yoruba tradition: each bowl holds a different element that a newly married couple will experience in their lifetime together. The bowls are neither precious art nor ceremonial objects. “I wanted to make the piece that was used in the ceremony but then these little dishes that you can use forever,” Batiste explains. “You don’t keep them on their ceremonial plinth—you can use them for anything and remember that day.”

Her interest in multifunctional objects that hold multiple histories within them carries over to hope/memory (2023), a pair of stoneware bowls that feature Batiste’s characteristic small markings and which she created with nine other people. As each person laid coils for the bowls, they invested their hopes and memories into the clay. The shiny glazed interiors of the bowls suggest both silky softness and shellacked protection that may be characteristic of the potters’ inner lives, whereas the uneven surfaces of the bowls’ textured exteriors underscore the many hits one takes while living a life.

Complementing the production of her functional ware, Batiste is moving toward more sculptural works. Earlier this year, she completed an abstract portrait of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer called five feet four inches forward (2024), a composition of 64 slabs of clay that speaks to the massive amount of work done by Hamer and of the sharecroppers she organized throughout the South. Batiste practices a rich color theory in managing the different post-kiln hues of the “plum black” clay she used—clay that points both to the earth Hamer toiled upon and the richness of her skin. The sculpture’s title comes from Hamer herself: “But if I fall, I’ll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom.”

Five feet four inches forward forges a material connection between Batiste’s and Hamer’s laboring bodies while underscoring the pervasive risk that shapes Black life and clay processes. The vulnerability required to work in clay is further underscored by tesselatum (2019), a hanging piece that is made of four lines of warped clay tablets strung together with leather. It is unclear whether the small cracks in each tablet are environmental or technical mistakes, but they are held together by the artist’s intervention: copper bindings. The seemingly fragile pieces are pulled ever downward by gravity yet held up by one another.

Batiste’s rising star is due in part to her refreshing take on minimalism, given how Western art worlds tacitly expect Black artists to work within figurative and text-based traditions in order to directly and literally reflect on sociopolitical issues. Minimalism has historically been perceived as the absence of politics, if not flight from it. The great minimalist artists often worked to harness “pure” qualities of experience, aesthetics, and materials. For Batiste, meaning can never be contained within the art object nor within the bounds of experiencing it.

The simplicity of her work invites reflection and affords profoundly collaborative moments of co-thinking that are only intensified by her medium of choice. “When there is a lot going on, it’s really hard to come out with a clear idea or a clear purpose,” she says. “And I think that taking away extraneous stuff to reveal what is essential—like, this is what is absolutely essential and needed for this—I find it very calming.”

Her minimalist approach can also be productively high stakes, however. “When there’s a single line or shape or absence, every decision around that element matters more—the weight and shape and color and texture and orientation,” Batiste says. “Of course, all those things matter in a maximalist or realist composition, but because that single line doesn’t have anything else to share the load with, it has to carry everything. I like how deliberate that makes the work. There’s no hiding.”

Arts writer and editor Kemi Adeyemi is an associate professor of gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is the author of Feels Right: Black Queer Women and the Politics of Partying in Chicago and directs The Black Embodiments Studio, an arts writing incubator, public programming initiative, and publishing platform that builds discourse on contemporary Black art.