Reverend Joyce McDonald on the healing power of art
Introducing Reverend Joyce McDonald—the first artist to join West Elm’s new ceramics residency at our Brooklyn studios.
The Artist in Residence initiative
Post pandemic shutdown, the ceramics studio at our product design facility in Brooklyn was ripe for reimagining. “We spent three weeks reclaiming all the dried clay that had been sitting since Covid,” says senior studio manager Gary Webb, who spearheaded the initiative. Now, the space hosts established and emerging BIPOC artists who don’t have access to a traditional ceramics studio to explore the medium.
“We’re a Brooklyn-based company, so artists are in our backyard,” says Gary. “It’s easy for them to get here and create new work.” This year, eight BIPOC artists will each have 12 weeks of full studio access, plus the assistance of a ceramic technician to help with things like running the kilns and monitoring the drying process.
The first artist to join this program is Brooklyn native and self-taught multidisciplinary artist Reverend Joyce McDonald. A chaplain, AIDS survivor, advocate and activist, Joyce calls herself a “testimonial artist,” telling her story through her work and seeing what pours out as she creates. “A lot of my art starts one way, and before I know it, it’s done a total change,” she says. “I have no control over it.”
“I go into a place I cannot explain when I’m sculpting.”
Discovering her medium
Always artistically inclined (as a teen, she performed at Harlem’s Apollo Theater), Joyce didn’t find sculpture until later in life. After years battling addiction culminating in an HIV diagnosis in 1985, she sought out a support program that offered healing through the arts—ceramics included.
“Once I touched the clay, it’s like something just came over me. I started doing sculptures, and they unleashed the deepest-darkest secrets in my life.”
“Never give up on a wounded, broken person. As bad as the things I’ve been through were, I’m here to talk about them, to tell others that they can make it.” —Reverend Joyce McDonald
From brokenness comes beauty
Today, Joyce’s past fuels her art and ministry work. She founded an HIV awareness and creative arts group for girls, works with women in shelters and hospitals, and fosters healing through sculpture, painting, poetry and song. In all her activism and advocacy, she champions the power of:
■ Creating: “I create when I’m happy, when I’m sad, when I have, when I don’t have,” says Joyce. “I must create; it’s a part of my breath.”
■ Loving yourself: “I remember the day I said, ‘Joyce, I love you, you’re beautiful.’ And then, I realized that Black was beautiful, for me.”
■ Processing pain through art: “Feelings always come back. I’m able to do painful sculptures and see them, face what I went through, experience the emotions and find the joy that I get from the work.”