Red Lodge Clay Center – Short-Term Resident (ASPN) 2018, Long-Term Resident 2023-2025
Maxwell Henderson is an artist originally from Arizona. He studied at Arizona State, Penn State, and earned his MFA in ceramics at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Since 2018, Maxwell’s work has been featured nationally through various juried and invitational exhibitions. His work has earned multiple awards, including a grant from the Rudy Autio Endowment Fund.
Maxwell has completed several residencies, including a long-term residency at Red Lodge Clay Center and AMOCA in Southern California. He has also done summer residencies at the Archie Bray Foundation and La Serra Collective in Denver CO.
Growing up in poverty and navigating racial hierarchies as a biracial person taught me to see value as unstable and shifting. That perspective shapes how I approach clay—a material both dismissed as ordinary and essential to human culture. My kinship with ceramics lives in these contradictions and is expressed through attentive labor, a dialogue between intention and chance, the lens of my lived experience, and lessons drawn from ceramics’ expansive lineage. These foundations anchor my practice.
I work with clay and glaze through a process that balances control and release. For example, I decide pattern and form; the material dictates the organic undulations of a rim. I laboriously set deliberate structures and intentional boundaries, knowing the kiln and material will assert their own agency. Glaze flows and pools unpredictably, making each work the result of shared authorship. Within this transformation, the traces of labor remain integral to the work’s quality, echoing the tension between the necessity of time spent and a culture that prioritizes efficiency.
Growing up, I would survive by naming my trauma before listening to how my body responded to it. I reversed that strategy through making work I want a viewer to feel before understanding. That sensation lives in the weight of form, in the way glaze shifts with gravity and light, and in the layered dialogue between color and texture. My practice continues ceramics’ lineage of experimentation—failure, testing, and reworking—embodying clay and glaze’s dual nature as both fragile and enduring, ordinary and extraordinary, resisting and yielding.