Reverend Joyce McDonald: Renewal

Gordon Robichaux is pleased to present Renewal, Reverend Joyce McDonald’s third solo exhibition at the gallery and her first since her retrospective exhibition at the Bronx Museum earlier this year. McDonald dedicates the show to family with an opening on Mother’s Day and a closing on Father’s Day.

Renewal unites ten of McDonald’s figurative sculptures created over the past four decades, several of which have never been previously exhibited. Each of the artist’s intimate artworks, which she refers to as “testimonial sculptures,” memorializes a person, experience, memory, or vision that McDonald translates into clay and adorns with humble materials such as paper towels, costume pearls, scraps of fabric, plastic plant sprigs, small rocks, and fragments of jewelry. The artist’s process is therapeutic, and the works resonate with emotional immediacy, spiritual energy, and the conviction of McDonald’s faith, which inspires their creation. As she has shared: “When I make art, I touch the clay and my hands move. I don’t know what I’m going to make—the Spirit guides me.”