Osa Atoe (Ah-toy) is a Nigerian-American ceramic artist living in Sarasota, FL. Pottery by Osa grew out of her kitchen in New Orleans in 2015 and has since expanded to a full-sized studio. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Sociology and she’d been involved in activist groups for many years, but her passion was music. She played in various punk bands for 15 years, touring all over the US and Europe. Aside from music, she wrote a zine (turned book) about Black punks & outsider artists called Shotgun Seamstress. Atoe took her first pottery class at age 34. A few years later, she completed a year-long post-baccalaureate program for ceramics at Louisiana State University and has pursued various alternative learning opportunities since. She encourages others in their path to ceramics by leading Kaabo Clay, a community for Black potters.
Osa Atoe is an American studio potter using her work to honor the heritage of African continental and diasporic ceramicists who molded pots for sustenance, ritual, and community. Form and surface decoration techniques link Atoe’s pottery to a lineage extending back to Nigeria, where her parents immigrated from in the 1970s. Through her focus on Black clay cultures, Atoe manages to find a universal language in clay—one that speaks across cultures. Her African- and nature-inspired pottery is a testament to our shared humanity. Atoe’s pottery creates points of connection that highlight our commonalities rather than our differences, a balm in our increasingly polarized society. She believes her pottery manifests as symbols of idealism, and are a visual and tactile respite from the division, acrimony, and injustice of the world.
About her work in Clay as Place: The Transient Object, Osa says:
I am presenting work decorated with terra sigillata made from clays I’ve foraged from various locations, including my birthplace. In the summer of 2025, I presented at a conference in Roanoke, Virginia and was able to visit Blacksburg, where I was born, just an hour away. My parents both attended Virginia Tech there, and I was raised in that town until the age of five, when we relocated to the Washington, DC suburbs.
On my trip last year, I made it a point to return to the campus duck pond, a place tied to my childhood memories, and I was able to collect a small amount of clay from this location, which I processed into terra sigillata. I have included in this collection of pots two mugs that feature this sig, along with ceramic decal photographs of myself and my best friend as toddlers feeding the ducks on that pond. As I decorate with these different clays, I am automatically transported back to the origins of the material. A small ball of clay is a piece of a place that I can bring back home with me, into my studio, to create meaningful works that are then sent back out into the world.