Bianca MacPherson creates ceramic sculptures that explore identity, perception, memory, and the experience of existing between worlds. Drawing on her experience as a mixed-race Black woman, as well as personal and collective histories, she examines how identity is shaped by what we remember, overlook, assume, or claim as our own. Using abstraction, she transforms references from historical and personal photographs, illustrations, and archival research into forms that exist between recognition and ambiguity, inviting viewers to question how perception is shaped by experiences, assumptions, and histories.
Originally from Buffalo, New York, MacPherson’s work has been exhibited nationally. Selected exhibitions include Compulsion (2026) and Fractured Foundations at the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, California; the 2026 NCECA Conference exhibition, Volumes, in Detroit, Michigan; BLACK CLAY at ARTE NOIR Gallery in Seattle, Washington; and VIEWPOINTS: Ceramics at the Hyde Art Gallery at Grossmont College in El Cajon, California. She has also presented her work at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York, the University of Colorado Boulder, and the Academy Center of the Arts in Lynchburg, Virginia.
MacPherson was selected as a 2026 NCECA Emerging Artist and has led educational workshops throughout the United States, sharing both technical building strategies and conceptual approaches to making. She received her MFA from Pennsylvania State University and her BFA from Buffalo State University. She has participated in workshops and residencies nationwide, including residencies at Laguna Clay Company, the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts (2025), Haystack Mountain School of Craft, and Penland School of Craft. MacPherson co-organized the Re-Mixed Residency at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in 2025 and serves as the Community Arts Representative on the executive board of the Critical Mixed Race Studies Association, fostering dialogue and advocacy around nuanced and multiracial identities through artistic and community engagement.
Visit Bianca MacPherson’s website and Instagram page.
Featured work
Selected works, 2025-2026
Existing between worlds requires navigating the projections of others while simultaneously constructing one’s own reality. As a mixed-race Black woman, I inhabit that space, negotiating the tension between visibility and erasure, belonging and ambiguity. This experience has become both the foundation of my practice and the lens through which I understand the world.
I work through historical and personal photography, illustration, and archival research to extract and abstract forms, contexts, and hidden patterns from the American landscape. I am interested in the quiet traces that reveal themselves through history, the layered memories and subtle presences that remind us that racial multiplicity has always existed. Through archival materials and my own familial histories, I explore perception, inheritance, and the ways identity is shaped by what is remembered, overlooked, or claimed as our own.
Rather than recreating these images, I use abstraction to loosen the certainty of the archive. I pull apart fragments, mirror forms, and distort imagery to create new relationships between history, memory, and perception. Abstraction allows these sources to move beyond documentation and become something more fluid, where multiple meanings can exist at once.
Clay became the material that could hold these questions. Its ability to move between fluidity and permanence mirrors the tensions I explore throughout my work. Through a slow coiling process, I build each sculpture layer by layer. The repetition is meditative, allowing the forms to develop intuitively over time. Rather than resolving these ideas, clay allows me to sit with them, giving form to uncertainty and inviting multiple interpretations.
In recent work, I have begun Rorschaching my forms, reflecting a fractured double consciousness. By duplicating, mirroring, and distorting images from historical sources, I fracture their original contexts while creating subliminal connections that persist through symmetry. The resulting sculptures exist somewhere between recognition and abstraction, asking viewers to consider how much of what they see comes from the object itself and how much comes from their own experiences, assumptions, and histories.
I work primarily in black and white, often color matching the archive from which the source inspiration emerges. This reductive palette mirrors the ways we often attempt to categorize and simplify identity, while simultaneously revealing the complexity that exists within those boundaries. The variations within these binary tones create space for contradiction, ambiguity, and the layered experiences that exist beyond fixed definitions.
Through both making and teaching, I move beyond the object itself, creating opportunities for deeper inquiry and conversation between material, history, and community. My work does not seek to provide answers or create a singular understanding. Instead, it invites viewers to embrace uncertainty, question perception, and consider what becomes possible when we allow space for complexity.
