@chotsanielaine
chotsanielainedean

CHOTSANI ELAINE DEAN

BIOGRAPHY
Chotsani Elaine Dean, b. Hartford, CT, is an artist and Assistant Professor of Ceramics at the University of Minnesota. She received her BFA in ceramics from Hartford Art School and her Master of Fine Arts degree from Sam Fox School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis. Dean is coauthor of the book, Contemporary Black American Ceramic Artists, Schiffer Publishing. She was awarded the McKnight Artist Fellowship award for ceramics, has been in residence at the John Michael Kohler Artist Residency, and recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Teaching and Research grant. Dean was the inaugural MJ DO Good resident at Red Lodge Clay Center in Montana, held the position of studio manager at Wesleyan Potters in Middletown, Connecticut, and is the recipient of a Connecticut Arts Grant. She has lectured and exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions and has taught at institutions including Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, India, University of Connecticut, Connecticut College, and Hartford Art School.

ARTIST STATEMENT
The complex, layered realities of my communal ancestry's history and visual archives set forth the foundations of creative purpose in my studio practice and research. A significant part of my research is rooted in quilts made during the early European colonization of North America through post-antebellum, stitched on and off cotton plantations into the mid-20th century by enslaved and free African Americans. These quilts, their makers' lives, and the material that gives them life, cotton, serve as historical sources and points of departure I use to examine, explore, and comprehend this dreadful time in America's history while simultaneously searching and locating connected global and cultural economics, commodities, and realities of people and place and the entanglements therein that have rippled into the present.

These quilts and their makers fascinate me for their uniqueness in origin, evolution, aesthetics, visual endurance, and range of creative techniques and processes. I always return to them, as visual anchors for me and provide a wealth of historical substance and location that informs my selection of and approach to ceramic material, while I embrace the expanded field of material to graft with ceramic material or as ancillary materials that support and expand established and new technical processes.

Cotton, from which the textiles are made to create the quilts is the material my ancestors, both enslaved and free, cultivated and picked. Cotton, the commodity at the center of my lineage, led me to the global history, trade, and impact of its production in textiles and trade. Following cotton off the plantations of the American South and the financial markets of the North, I encounter various other cultures, economies, and time periods connected to ‘king cotton’ unearthing interconnected journeys, timelines, sometimes appearing non-linear from the past to the present.

 Quilts from these periods reveal and preserve the historical blending of aesthetics and the emergence of a distinct material culture that allows me to move between and mediate the debatable and pliable line of craft and art. The diverse and interconnected histories I encounter from following cotton through time permeates and informs my work and how I title my pieces.. The historical and anthropological function of ceramic history through cultures and the spectrum of technical processes accumulated over time exposed me to a deep treasure of possibilities to search and respond to the peripheral or lost parts of history.