Anina Major: Tender Seedlings
Larkin Durey is delighted to present Tender Seedlings, a collection of works presented for Anina Major’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.
Inspired by the poem Seedling by A. L. Major, the works consider how identity is formed through movement, memory, and transformation, as childhood nostalgia collides with adulthood realities and the self is shaped across distance from family, community, and country.
In establishing a home contrary to her birthplace, The Bahamas, Major is motivated to investigate the relationship between self and place as a condition of becoming rather than origin. Her practice reflects a diasporic understanding of identity—one formed through circulation, displacement, and adaptation—where cultural belonging is not fixed to a single location but carried forward through lived experiences. Using the traditional weaving technique, plaiting, taught to her by her late grandmother, Major translates a fragile, portable craft into ceramic form, allowing inherited knowledge to migrate across materials, geographies and time.
Her desire to fabricate her own terms of cultural identity and its defining influence, results in works that function as holders of cultural movement, where memory, labour, and imagination persist despite fracture. Tender Seedlings aligns material culture with Black Atlantic lineage and carries Black cosmology and metaphysics forward, proving that culture survives not only through nation or archive, but through embodied practices that travel. The work serves as an ongoing celebration and reclamation, positioning craft as a vital cultural infrastructure through which identity, resilience, and continuity are sustained and offering a nuanced reflection on inheritance and belonging.
Major holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. She is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including being a 2026 USA Fellow, finalist in the 2025 Loewe Craft Prize, winner of the Armory Show 2024 Pommery Prize, the 2023 Joan Mitchell Fellowship and the EKWC, Centre-of-excellence for ceramics international artist-in-residency. Major’s work has been exhibited in The Bahamas, Europe and across the United States, with a permanent display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.
Her work is included in permanent collections of the National Gallery of The Bahamas, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, the Perez Art Museum of Miami, York Art Gallery and Detroit Institute of Arts Museum, among others. Her work has also been featured in the New York Times, Forbes magazine and published in Phaidon Press Great Women Sculptors.
