ABOUT
Maya Beverly (b. Atlanta, GA) is a visual artist based in New York, whose work is primarily centered around Sculpture and Ceramics. In 2020, she received her BFA from New York University in Studio Art. Her work has been shown in exhibitions widely throughout the United States and internationally in the United Kingdom, Nigeria, South Africa and Mexico. In 2024, she was named 1 of “29 Emerging Black Artists to Discover” by Artsy. She has held ceramic and book-making residencies at Women’s Studio Workshop, The Archie Bray Foundation, The Center for Book Arts and Ox-Bow School of the Arts. Beverly’s work is held in several public collections and libraries, including Apple Music, Princeton University’s Graphic Art Collection and The Metropolitan Museum of Art's, Thomas J. Watson Library. Her work will be featured in Black Clay: Black Women, Ceramics and Contemporary Art by Dr. Jareh Das, published by Yale University Press (2027).
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Through her practice, she seeks a comprehensive understanding of how the function of an object extends beyond its materiality and often communicates something unseen. Working primarily in ceramics, Her process involves combining research material and referencing culturally significant objects from memory, historical and personal archives. She employs hand-building techniques including coil-building and slab-making as a foundation of her practice, while often integrating these processes with other materials such as gold-leaf, concrete, pvc, and paint. Themes relating to mythologies and cosmologies emerge in the work, as she further investigates the power of objects, positionality, and animism. By centering her work around ceramics and sculpture, she engages its materiality while exploring how imagined or projected properties can supersede an object’s intended function, revealing the nature of what we consider fixed or real.