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8.75″ x 9.5″ x 9.5″ ceramic $8000

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Donté K. Hayes

Donté K. Hayes graduated summa cum laude from Kennesaw State University, earning a BFA in Ceramics and Printmaking with a minor in Art History. He went on to receive both his MA and MFA, with honors, from the University of Iowa, where he was awarded the prestigious University of Iowa Arts Fellowship in 2017.

Hayes is the recipient of numerous distinguished honors, including the 2019 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art from the Gibbes Museum of Art. He was also named a 2019 Ceramics Monthly Emerging Artist and an Artaxis Fellow. In 2022, he was awarded the Grand Prize in the “Coined in the South” exhibition at the Mint Museum, as well as the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant.

His work has been exhibited internationally at prominent venues and fairs, including 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London, Design Miami, and a solo presentation at The Armory Show in 2021.

Hayes’s work is held in numerous significant public collections, including the Renwick Gallery, Minnesota Museum of American Art, Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane, Gibbes Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Newark Museum of Art, Wellin Museum of Art, Stanley Museum of Art, Des Moines Art Center, Crocker Art Museum, Gardiner Museum, and the Institute Museum of Ghana, among others.

He has participated in residencies at leading institutions, including MacDowell, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Township 10 (Marshall, North Carolina), Penland School of Craft, Hambidge Center, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, and Peninsula School of Art. In 2023, he returned to Kennesaw State University as a Windgate Fellow.

Hayes states:

“Artifacts are a tangible history, capable of retaining, transforming, erasing, and evoking lost knowledge. My work is informed by research into traditional African heirlooms and rites of passage—birth, adulthood, marriage, eldership, and ancestry—which are fundamental to human development and resonate across the African diaspora. Drawing from history, science fiction, and hip-hop culture, I use ceramics as a foundational material to explore memory and the past.

The physical handling of clay reveals process and preserves the marks of the maker. Using a needle tool, I create individual incisions across the surface, each strand contributing to a larger collective form. I liken this process to the remix in rap music, reflecting how materials—and people—are deconstructed, reassembled, and adapted across environments to form new identities.

The repetition of texture and pattern establishes a visual language of memory, ritual, and familiarity. Many sculptures are presented as inverted vessels, symbolizing the disorientation of the contemporary world. Ceramics becomes a bridge through which disparate objects and images are conceptually integrated, generating new connections between material, history, and sociopolitical experience. These works function as modern artifacts—preserving, empowering, and documenting both past and present in service of healing and understanding for the future.”