There is a kind of silence that lives in Caribbean Canadian homes. It is the silence of the grandmother who does not talk about the crossing. The uncle who shrugs when you ask what Jamaica was like before he left. The whole histories we were never told, carried instead in hands that could braid, season, mend, build. This October, one of Toronto’s best museums is putting that silence on display and giving it a voice made of clay.
After the Island: Caribbean Canadian Ceramics opens October 9 at the Gardiner Museum and runs through April 25, 2027. It is a landmark curatorial partnership between the Gardiner, Black Artists’ Networks in Dialogue (BAND), and the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. Four artists. One medium. Centuries of Caribbean memory pressed into earthenware.
Here is what you need to know before you go.
The show, in plain terms
Clay is one of the oldest recording devices on earth. Long before our people had access to publishing houses and gallery walls, we had our hands. After the Island treats ceramics the way a DJ treats a sample: as a way of looping the past into the present.
The exhibition gathers four Caribbean Canadian artists: PJ Anderson, Eddy Firmin, Manuel Mathieu, and Sharon Norwood. Through existing and newly commissioned work, each one approaches the same questions from a different shore: What does it mean to carry a homeland inside a body that lives in Canada? What survives the journey, and what gets reinvented?
The Gardiner’s own framing goes further. The show explores knowledge transfer and what it calls the liberatory potential of the clandestine. That is a careful way of saying something our grandparents knew instinctively: the things enslaved and colonized people were forced to hide are often the things that saved them. In this exhibition, vessels, decorative forms, and sculptural installations become the hiding places where history was preserved, challenged, reimagined, and carried forward.
The artists
PJ Anderson is a ceramic artist from Thompson, Manitoba, now based in Winnipeg. She has shown across Canada and internationally, studied Zulu ceramic traditions in South Africa as a researcher, and currently teaches in the Winnipeg Art Gallery studio program. Her work sits at the intersection of scholarship and the handmade.
Eddy Firmin’s Sans signe (2023) is the striking masked figure you are seeing in the exhibition’s key image: a costumed body seated in a wooden boat, straw crown, cowrie shells, hand raised to the mouth. It reads like a masquerader mid-voyage, which is exactly the point. Migration has always been a costume drama: you dress yourself in what the new country requires and keep the old clothes underneath.
Manuel Mathieu is one of the most decorated painters of the Haitian diaspora, and his presence in a ceramics show is itself a statement about how Caribbean artists refuse to stay in one lane.
Sharon Norwood is Jamaican-born and works across ceramics, drawing, found objects, and installation. Her signature is the curly line, a formal gesture that doubles as a reference to Afro-textured hair and the Black body. She has exhibited in Canada, the United States, Jamaica, and Germany. For Jamaican readers, hers is the work to sit with longest.
What does this mean for us?
Let us be direct. Toronto is home to one of the largest Caribbean communities on earth, and our stories still enter museums through the side door. Exhibitions like this one matter because they put Caribbean Canadian artists in the main hall, on the third floor, with institutional weight behind them. This is not a side gallery during Black History Month. It is a six and a half month run in one of the country’s most respected ceramics museums, co-presented with an American institution.
There is also a sister exhibition worth knowing about. In San Francisco, the Museum of the African Diaspora is presenting After the Island: Ornament and Ceramic Practice in the Jamaican Diaspora, featuring PJ Anderson, Sharon Norwood, and Jamaican artist Jacqueline Bishop. That edition is explicitly about Jamaica as memory, inheritance, and cultural touchstone, examining how ornament carries history, labour, and ancestral knowledge across time and distance. Two cities, two shows, one conversation. If you have family in the Bay Area, tell them.
The deeper point is the one the curators are making with clay itself. Caribbean people have always been makers. We make a way out of no way, and we make beauty out of what we are given. A ceramic vessel is just a practical object until a Caribbean artist touches it. Then it becomes an archive, a map, a letter home. Go see what survived the crossing.
Plan your visit
After the Island: Caribbean Canadian Ceramics runs October 9, 2026 through April 25, 2027 at the Gardiner Museum, 111 Queen’s Park, in the Exhibition Hall on the third floor. Admission is $18 for adults, $14 for seniors 65 and up, and free for visitors 18 and under, students with valid ID, and Indigenous Peoples. Here is the move: Wednesdays are free after 4 pm. The museum is open Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday from 10 am to 6 pm, Wednesdays until 9 pm, and weekends from 10 am to 5 pm.
Two dates to circle. The public opening is Thursday, October 8 from 7:30 to 9 pm, free with registration, with the artists and curators in the room, music, and drinks available for purchase. Capacity is limited, so register ahead on the Gardiner’s site. The artist panel follows on Friday, October 9 at 6 pm, moderated by curators Joséphine Denis and Dr. Sequoia Miller, with all four artists and a Q and A.
One practical note from the museum: some artworks in the exhibition include scent, so if you are sensitive to odours, be advised.
A final word of honesty. This writeup is built on the museum’s official listings, which I verified this morning. I have not yet walked the exhibition myself. When I do, I will tell you what hit hardest. In the meantime, the opening night is three days away, it is free with registration, and the artists are in the building. Caribbean Toronto, this one is ours. Show up.
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