2025 Mudge Fellow tells stories with ceramics

Kristina Batiste, the 2025 Mudge Fellow, hasn’t worked with high-school students often, but relished the chance to do so at Groton School this past week. 

“One of the reasons that I wanted to do this was because I don’t have much exposure with people of this generation at all,” Ms. Batiste said. “I wanted to spend some time around these people and see how they think differently than I do, or what they’re thinking about, or what they’re doing that’s different or interesting.”

As Mudge Fellow, Ms. Batiste—a Tacoma-based ceramics artist—opened her Brodigan Gallery exhibition, “even a woman or a slave,” this past weekend, followed by a week of hands-on studio time in the Dillon Art Center with all art and non-art students, including drop-in workshops for anyone in the community and more intensive collaborations with ceramics students.

“I wanted them to do something that was a little bit interdisciplinary, where they took a character from something that they’ve read in their English classes and design some pottery pieces—some dinnerware, some tableware—but not in the way of ‘I’m making something for Juliet so I’m going to put a picture of Juliet on there, or I’m going to put pictures of the play on there.’ It should be something that Juliet would want. And that was a bit of a leap. We really had to talk through where we were going.”

As someone who became an artist later in life and understands the challenges some students had with trying out pottery, Ms. Batiste said she tried to keep drop-in activities light and fun. 

 

“Pottery is not something that you learn in one day,” she said. “It is something that you learn over a period of weeks or months. So coming in and having a fun experience with clay is the goal of a drop-in session. It’s not to really learn that thing. It’s like learning to read: You don’t learn to read in an afternoon, you learn to read over time, and this is what that was like. I think it was fun. I think people had a good time playing around and seeing that, while it might look relaxing and fun and easy on YouTube, it’s hard to do.” 

 

Prior to arriving on the Circle, Ms. Batiste sent students a video explaining the scope of their project, and where they’d start—with five words describing who they were as an artist and five words describing their character. 

 

“One thing that I found really refreshing and really delightful was that I met with the students this week one on one about what their concept was, so I was able to find out what they wanted to do with this work, how they wanted their voice to come through, who their characters were,” she explained. “From there, we were able to refine it so it wasn’t just their first idea."

“Overall, I think it went really well,” she added. “One thing that’s really nice about this school in particular is that all of the kids are really respectful. They’re very willing to come and sit down and listen and learn. So from that point of view, that’s a great thing. It’s just really nice to be able to come into a classroom and have students who are going to listen to what you’re going to say. They’re really open to trying something.”

As she explained in an Instagram post about the exhibit, “even a woman or a slave” is based on a “throwaway” line from Aristotle’s Poetics, the classic treatise on storytelling: “Even a woman or a slave can be a good character, even though women are inferior beings and slaves are basically worthless.”

“That word, ‘even,’ got under my skin, because it really betrays the pervasiveness of that idea that women and people who are slaves or are powerless—take the word slave as you will—are incapable of really being the main character, of really carrying the story,” said Ms. Batiste. “That’s so important, because the stories we tell are not just the stories we tell. They shape the world we live in. And so I wanted to create these sculptures in opposition to that and show that, yes, even someone who looks like me can carry those things.” 

Looking back on her week on the Circle, Ms. Batiste said she was excited to have had the chance to show students what the life of a working artist is like. 

“Some of these kids will become artists, I’m sure, and some of them might have artists for parents, but a lot of people don’t know any working artists,” she said. “So just being able to meet and see a working artist is interesting, and getting an idea about how we think and how we approach our work. If they were able to come to my gallery talk or see my exhibition, they were able to get an idea of how one artist approaches putting together a piece of work.

She also encouraged any student interested in pottery or ceramics to take advantage of what the Dillon Art Center has to offer: “That facility is incredible and so, if you’re interested in pottery, try and carve out some time to get in there and work on it.”

Groton School’s Mudge Fellowship is a weeklong artist-in-residence program made possible through generous funding by the Mudge family in 1992. 

 

Kristina Batiste’s “even a woman or a slave” is on display in Groton School’s Christopher Brodigan Gallery through March 7.