What We Fund

2021 | New Orleans

Material: painted bisqued stoneware

“BUOYANCY: Love in Joy is a painted hand-built ceramic sculpture celebrating my love for the city and people of New Orleans.

Buoyancy is an act of floating and a state of optimism. My New Orleans is a city of bodies in interactive motion and spirits in regular cycles of absorption and ascension. For over 25 years I have danced many dances with New Orleans, from my first experience at Congo Square with drummers releasing ancestor calls to acknowledge our past, to the union of children and elders fear-free in the syncopated steps of a Second Line. Through storms of loss and the rebirth of healing we float with the power of a tugboat. We dance strong and bright with life.

My intention is to create an invitation to join a moment of joy.” – MaPó Kinnord

About the Artist

MaPó Kinnord grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. She received her first training in ceramics through Cleveland’s Quaker-founded alternative high school, the School on Magnolia. She apprenticed with several production potters before receiving her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1984. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Ohio State University in 1994. Arriving in New Orleans in 1995, she now serves as an Associate Professor of Art at Xavier University. A well-respected educator, Kinnord has taught workshops in Matsue, Japan, as well as the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine and the Penland School of Craft in North Carolina. Her Contemplative Clay Project explores clay-working as a meditative practice. Her solo exhibition, Outside In, Improvisations of Space: The Ceramic Work of MaPó Kinnord, was mounted at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in 2021. A lifelong scholar, she has researched the traditional and contemporary art of Ghana extensively, and has produced video documentation of the traditional pottery, kiln building and ceramic architecture of West Africa.