Opening reception: Saturday, September 19, 2026, 6 - 9 PM

Exhibitions run September 20 - November 8, 2026

 

Trading Post: 41.77260° N, 72.66754° W, when a garden doesn’t return or can’t be found by Chotsani Elaine Dean offers a profound exploration of complex, layered realities. Dean’s practice is deeply informed by the visual archives and communal history of her ancestry. Her research finds its foundation in quilts created from the early European colonization of North America through the post-antebellum era—works stitched by enslaved and free African Americans on and off cotton plantations. These quilts, and the cotton that gives them life, serve as historical departure points to examine a painful era in American history. Through her work, Dean locates connected global economics and cultural commodities, unearthing the entanglements of people and place that continue to ripple into the present.

 

Quilts and their makers act as an anchor in Dean’s work,  both as aesthetic and conceptual touch points; they historically locate her and inform her selections of and approach to ceramic material. In this expanded field of ceramics Dean works with ancillary materials that expand on established techniques while also forging new technical processes. Cotton, from which the quilts are made, is the material  her ancestors, both enslaved and free, cultivated, picked and sewed. Cotton, the commodity at the center of Dean’s lineage, led her 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, she encounters 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. The diverse and interconnected histories she encounters from following cotton through time permeates and informs her practice and work titles. The historical and anthropological function of ceramic history through cultures, is also of this earth like cotton, and is a treasure of possibilities to search and respond to the peripheral, hidden and lost parts of history.  

 

Chotsani Elaine Dean is an artist and assistant professor of ceramics at University of Minnesota. Born in Hartford, CT, Chotsani received her BFA in ceramics from Hartford Art School and MFA from Sam Fox School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2014, Dean was the inaugural MJ DO GOOD resident at Red Lodge Clay Center in Montana. She was awarded a nine-month Teaching/Research Fulbright Scholar grant in India 2012–13, host institution Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, India. Dean has lectured and exhibited widely, including 701 Contemporary Center for Contemporary Art, Northern Clay Center, Moon Gallery at Berry College, Katherine Walsh Gallery, Appalachia State University, Kriti Gallery, Aurodhran Gallery, Hans Weiss Newman Space, and Hunterdon Museum of Art. In 2010, Dean was awarded a Connecticut Arts Grant from the State of Connecticut. Dean has also taught at Three Rivers Community College, University of Connecticut, Connecticut College, Quinnipiac University, and Hartford Art School.