Murjoni Merriweather’s Clay Sculptures Shape Black Style Into Renaissance Era Art

MURJONI MERRIWEATHER

Artist Murjoni Merriweather is gifted with a rare ability: the potter’s touch. With just dirt and water in her hands, she is able to form life-like images of the Black men, women, and children we see in our homes and on our street corners every day. Based in Maryland, the sculptor works delicately with clay to transform the formless faces of her imagination into inspiring, material creations. As she basks in her studio filled with shelved-rows of ceramic Black heads, it’s clear Merriweather isn’t just creating art: she’s fashioning a spiritual army. 

“I really see my sculptures as guardians. I see them as protectors,” Merriweather told HelloBeautiful. “I am making my safe space, literally, and I’m hoping that my sculptures also give a safe space to other people.”

Merriweather said she picked up clay work in the eighth grade after dabbling in different art forms (like graphic design and photography) throughout her childhood. She said after taking her first clay class, she fell in love with the feeling of cool, mushy, wet, mud between her fingers. “I love to get dirty in my work,” she said. “I’m a tangible person. I like to touch textures. And I’ve always been that way since I was a kid.”

By the time she got to high school, Merriweather said she began to peruse the exhibition halls of museums in search of inspiration, but all she saw staring back at her were white, alabaster stone faces. “A lot of sculptures in museums didn’t look like me. And I didn’t really like that,” she said. “So, I decided to make work that looked like my family.”

Murjoni Merriweather: Shapeshifter

At first, her commitment to turning Black life into sculptured art wasn’t well received by her peers. Merriweather said as a student at a PWI, there weren’t many people who looked like her in the first place; so she decided to create the tribe she wanted around her.

That mission inspired her iconic Grillz series, which features Black contorted faces decked out in gold-toothed smiles and skinny cuban-link chains. At first, the art was negatively critiqued by her classmates (to this day, some spectators call her work scary) so she decided to make even more of them. A self-described “hard-headed” person (about as hard as her dried-clay pieces), Merriweather said the art of proving others wrong is just as thrilling as making the art itself. “I kept making them, and I kept making them, and I started making them in different ways, and then people started to enjoy it,” she told HelloBeautiful. 

Merriweather’s dedication paid off. Her work went on to be exhibited in Sweden (where she sold all three of her sculptures) and Grillz became the featured work on display at the Walters Museum in Baltimore. The choice to exhibit her work in the renaissance section of the museum was a bold and disruptive decision made by a white curator, she said. At the time, there was only one Black sculpture on display, and it was one of a Black slave. The curator asked if she could fill the room with Merriweather’s grill sculptures instead as a visible challenge to visitors’ narrow perceptions of renaissance art.

“I was like, love that. Let’s do it,” Merriweather said, “And I got so many photos from teachers [and] parents with their children next to this big grill sculpture. They’re like, ‘That looks like my uncle. That looks like my dad.’ The familiarity is such a beautiful thing to witness,” she said. The community’s passionate response to Merriweather’s work underscores her mission: to advocate for Black visibility at all costs, especially in an era where educational systems and governments are literally trying to wipe Black lives from history. Even how the pieces are shown is by design: they are required to be displayed at eye-level or higher, so exhibit visitors are never afforded the opportunity to look down on the image of a Black person. Merriweather said she often gets told her work is “unsettling,” which she says tells her more about the viewer than it does about the art. “I make work about Blackness and Black culture. So then my next question leads me to, what is your perception of Black culture?” she said. 

Every piece of pottery Merriweather produces is an attempt to publicly normalize Blackness. She said recently, she’s been intentional about directing her outward creative process inward for her own nourishment, too. One of her exhibits, Seed, which was on display fall of 2024 at the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum, was created as an ode to her own personal evolution. The piece features unnaturally elongated, stone heads that appear to grow like blooms from various soil mounds on the floor. “Seed was about my own healing, my own growth, how to ground myself,” she said. Creating Seed allowed Merriweather to work through her own impatience, as she reflected on the slow, tiny seed to green sprout germination system of nature. In a time where urgency and microwave-paced progress rules as culture’s king, Merriweather urges artists to resist the impulse to get rich or famous fast. Instead, she believes the art of becoming is a miracle itself.

“We have to learn to slow down and be patient, and know that things are coming in their time. And that’s what I was literally just talking about in Seed,” she said, “Learning about patience and growing my own seed. I can’t rush it.”