about isissa

Isissa Komada-John (b. 1988, New York, NY) is a mixed, Afro-Caribbean artist and designer, raised in Brooklyn and Queens. Working primarily in clay and on paper, her work explores hybridity and the in-between. Her functional and sculptural ritual vessels serve to encourage contemplative practice and support personal and collective liberation.

Isissa is a recipient of fellowships from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (Multicultural Fellowship), Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts (Windgate University Fellowship), and The Color Network. Her work has been exhibited nationally at the Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati, OH), Shaw Center for the Arts (Baton Rouge, LA), Benedicta Arts Center (St. Joseph, MN), and Antler Gallery (Portland, OR). She has been awarded grants and scholarships from Artists’ Literacies Institute and the Penland School of Craft. She was a 2022 artist-in-residence at Township 10.

In the past, Isissa served as the Exhibitions Manager and Designer for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, and as the Exhibitions Director of the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in Brooklyn. She holds an A.B. in Africana Studies from Brown University.

Isissa enjoys practices that support presence and healing, and has been a student of Buddhism for over ten years. She currently makes art and home on unceded Cherokee land in the mountains of Western North Carolina.

artist statement

My work is an offering of healing and wholeness generated from my personal exploration of the struggles and opportunities of my mixed-race and other hybrid identities. In my work, I conjure non-representational worlds, portraits, and stories as spells to support personal transformation.

I create vessels to manifest wishes, grieve the death of old parts, inspire acceptance, access embodied wisdom, and nourish the heart. Each vessel or series offers an invitation for use, from filling with water and speaking in prayers, to blowing out secrets from tiny holes in the form. These vessels bring speculative ancestral and futuristic practices into the present and act as containers to hold us emotionally and spiritually. They function in liminal spaces and embody a process of change. Each piece expands notions of ‘functional ware’ by advocating for our needs beyond the physical.

My objects explore integrating opposites -- ordered and chaotic, organic and geometric, bold and delicate, interior and exterior, simple and complex, dark and light, masculine and feminine, ancient and new, known and unknown. While these objects occupy a middle space that is all their own, they also wrestle with the fragmentation of their many parts. In form, my wheel-thrown and hand-altered objects are marked as hybrid with varied appendages and contrasting surface decoration. My practice sits at the intersection of art, craft, and collective healing.