Browse through the creations of multidisciplinary artist Malene Djenaba Barnett, and, at first glance, they seem straightforward: hand-cut, hand-carved tiles etched with intricate, repeating patterns that feel less decorative than declarative, as though they are trying to communicate something rather than simply adorn a surface. Adinkra symbols—traditional West African motifs from Ghana, each carrying its own meaning—appear throughout the work, alongside clear influences from West African, Caribbean, and architectural traditions. Every element seems rooted in a particular place, history, or visual language.
But the longer you look, the harder those boundaries are to hold because, for Barnett, belonging has never been a simple matter of place. It is shaped just as much, and perhaps more, by the journey that brings someone to where they are now.
Barnett grew up in Norwalk, Connecticut. “A small town,” she says, “where we were the only Black family in the neighborhood.” Her mother, originally from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, was a single parent and a maker: she taught macrame classes, sewed the family’s curtains from bed sheets, and fashioned Halloween costumes from scratch. Their homes were never white; they were colorful, patterned, and constantly being remade.
Woman standing beside modern dining room setup
Her grandmother, a dressmaker who had migrated to the US before her mother, carried the thread back further. Creativity passed through generations, not as formal instruction, but as a way of moving through the world.
Barnett carried this creativity forward by pursuing an undergraduate degree at the Fashion Institute of Technology, studying textile surface design. Then, in 1995, while still an undergraduate, she traveled to Ghana for the first time as part of a cultural exchange program. It reordered everything.
In Ghana, “I started to see how culture was infused in all aspects of life,” Barnett says. “Even how the shrubs were cut—they were Adinkra symbols. The architecture, the facades of buildings, the pathways, the textiles—art was just a way of life.”
Culture cannot be broken. You could see it in the food, in the dance, in the dress, the way we speak. And if you’re curious enough, you start to connect.
It was not the art she had encountered in Western environments: a painting on a wall, an object on a pedestal, sealed behind glass and context. In Ghana, art was functional, inhabited, and lived with. When Barnett returned, she approached every project differently.
Designing dinnerware for a class assignment, she imagined she was designing for the Ashanti king. There was, she says, no longer any “ifs, ands, or buts,” as she decided every project would carry an African-centered lens. That commitment is now most visible in her ceramics and, specifically, in what she refuses to do.
Barnett does not use the potter’s wheel. She tried it, she didn’t like it, and the refusal is not incidental. She explains that the wheel reflects a more Western approach that is structured, centered, and controlled. “When I’m doing it by hand,” she explains, “I allow the clay to tell me how it should be formed. It’s more of a conversation between the material and me, versus me telling it, no, I want you to be in this shape. The wheel dictates that.”
Modern dining set with table and chairs
Working by hand, however, is something else entirely. It is more direct, more intuitive, more responsive to the material itself. In hand-built forms, the marks of the body remain visible: pressure, movement, variation. The object carries the imprint of the maker in a very direct, immediate way.
That distinction is not just technical. It reflects a broader difference in how making is understood, whether as a process of control, in which the maker dictates and forces form upon the clay, or one of dialogue, in which form emerges through their reciprocal relationship.
Barnett’s ceramic work focuses primarily on tiles: hand-cut, hand-carved, hand-glazed, with deliberately limited use of glaze, instead “going back to different ancestral ways of finishing pottery.” These tiles are wall pieces, designed to cover surfaces and carry messages. The reference point is architectural, and it can be found in traditions like Hausa or Kassena buildings from Ghana, where walls are not neutral backgrounds but active communicators, embedding meaning into the structure of a space through carved and molded facade reliefs and surface ornamentation.
“If walls could talk,” Barnett says, “what would they be saying to you?”
Book cover titled crafted kinship with texture
Her current answer to that question is Black Power Scripts, a series of ceramic murals and objects on show at the Wexler Gallery. In that series, she uses the Adinkra alphabet to write the words “Black power” in repetition. “No matter what oppressive systems are in place,” she says, “our power will never be erased.” The piece imagines what it would mean to live with that affirmation daily, built into your walls rather than encountered occasionally.
For Barnett, design has an unshakeable role in carrying a culture across distance and disruption. Her Fulbright research in Jamaica, for which she spent nearly ten months studying African Jamaican pottery, confirmed what her earlier travels had suggested: culture does not break, even under the most brutal force.
“Culture cannot be broken,” she says plainly. “You could see it in the food, in the dance, in the dress, in the way we speak. And if you’re curious enough, you start to connect.”
Person holding patterned textile with geometric prints
Standing in the Jamaican countryside, watching local potters work, she sometimes felt she could have been in Ghana. It was not a coincidence. It was continuity. It was the same people, the same knowledge, carried across water and time.
That continuity is what her work records and extends. She describes makers as “truth seekers.” They document what official histories overlook, and they imagine, through their objects, what the future might yet become.
Her reply is immediate when asked whether the influence of diaspora artists is being properly recognized in American design: “The short answer is no, it is not being seen,” she says. “It’s still a novelty. I’ve been watching from the sidelines, and nothing has changed.”
The only way to gain a place in the center, rather than on the sidelines, is to “create our own,” she says emphatically, insisting that makers must take charge of generating their own opportunities to showcase their work. They need to build platforms and spaces of visibility that they control, so their work is encountered within the communities and cultural contexts it comes from, instead of being filtered through external validation or institutional gatekeepers that determine who gets to see and understand their work.
Makers, she says, should seek to redefine what visibility means; not Instagram coverage or magazine features, but whether your community sees itself reflected, whether local potters in St. Mary, Jamaica, know their work connects to something larger.
And Barnett is helping to make that happen. As founder of the Black Artists + Designers Guild, she has helped create a platform for Black creatives across disciplines. The aim is not only visibility but also recognition of the ways these artists are shaping contemporary design.
Textured patterned wall with round mirror inset
“I’m doing the work because I’m building on the legacy of my ancestors,” she says. “And I’m building a legacy so other makers will understand that this is possible—and that we could still do and be who we want to be, no matter what oppressive system is being held against us.”
That legacy includes her book Crafted Kinship (2024), which she describes as “a guide, a keepsake, and a creative bible” throughout which the “complex history of migration and diaspora” is woven. In it, she gathers the voices of over sixty Black Caribbean makers who are “reshaping the boundaries of Art and Design.” Through interviews and compelling photos, she documents how their work embodies both heritage and place—past and current, as seen in its key idea—that “land” continues to matter. It matters even when artists are far from where they began.
Crafted Kinship returns to the same question Barnett asks across all her work with interiors, tiles, textiles, and ceramics: what does it mean to carry where you come from into where you are?
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