David MacDonald

b. Hackensack, NJ, 1945

David R. MacDonald is a renowned ceramist whose driving commitment has been celebrating the human spirit and exploring his African ancestry through visual forms. In monumental stoneware vessels, shield-like plates, and figurative earthenware jars, MacDonald explores the cultural significance of clay, a humble material, which he transforms into vibrant, vital works.  

MacDonald graduated from Hackensack High School in 1963 and was awarded an athletic scholarship to Hampton University in Virginia, where he majored in art education. MacDonald recalls the moment he made his first mug out of clay, as part of an assignment for ceramic class, and used his creation to drink a cup of coffee. The artist fell in love with the medium’s practicality and capacity for transformation and believes in the power of utility in his medium. MacDonald, a master potter, returns to the vessel as the basis of his visual storytelling because of its intimate and ubiquitous presence across history: “there exists in the vessel a timelessness and universality that records, contains and continues the very essence of humanity.”  

In school, MacDonald encountered his mentor in ceramic artist Joseph W. Gilliard, who began to inspire his sculptural pursuits. MacDonald was awarded a graduate fellowship at the University of Michigan, where he studied with John Stephenson and ceramist Robert Stull. Encouraged by his teachers, Macdonald focused on social and political commentary within his work. His artistic practice became primarily influenced by the events of the Civil Rights Movement and comprised depictions of protest and injustice. After completing his MFA, he joined the faculty of the School of Art and Design at Syracuse University.  

Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, MacDonald increasingly explored his African heritage in an effort to move from anger towards joy. Drawing upon a variety of design sources in the vast creative tradition of the African continent, MacDonald incorporates elements of the textiles, architecture, and body decoration found in various cultural groups of sub-Saharan Africa. While MacDonald’s sculptures primarily take the form of utilitarian ceramic forms, the artist adorns their surfaces with meticulous geometric patterns, inscribed onto leather-hard clay using a variety of techniques – such as slip trailing and sgraffito – to reference scarification and architecture of the Igbo, Ndebele, and Maasai people.  

Concurrent with the 1991 beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles police, MacDonald began his landmark Middle Passage series, which incorporates imagery related to the Transatlantic slave trade. In particular, MacDonald adopts imagery from eighteenth century engravings showing aerial diagrams of enslaved peoples chained on ships, which he surrounds with colorful abstractions of African hair and body adornment. MacDonald thus acknowledges the historical oppression of Black Americans while simultaneously celebrating the magnitude of their contributions to American culture. 

MacDonald received the Excellence in Teaching Award from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) in 2011. In 1979, he was the subject of an exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, Vessels for the Human Spirit. He has been the subject of numerous solo university museum exhibitions, including Queens College, Charlotte, NC; North Carolina Wesleyan College, Rocky Mount, NC; Daura Gallery, Lynchburg College, Lynchburg, VA; List Gallery, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA; Hampton University, Hampton, VA; Fosdick-Nelson Gallery, New York College of Ceramics at Alfred University, Alfred, NY; and Tyler Art Gallery, State University of New York at Oswego, Oswego, NY. In 2011, he was the subject of The Power of Pattern, an exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY. His work is in the permanent collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; and the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse.