Larry Ossei-Mensah: What Survives the Fire

All’Bout Clay Gallery

247 West 36th Street, NYC

May 16th, 2026 - July 18th, 2026

10 am to 10 pm, Mon to Sun

“Clay found me when I needed to slow down.

We're living through a relentless moment that has impacted us politically, culturally, and spiritually. The world keeps demanding an answer to the same question: what are you made of? Clay offered me a different way in. When your hands are submerged in it, the noise recedes. You can't be somewhere else and make something real. Presence isn't a virtue here. It's a requirement.

The works in What Survives the Fire feature vessels and forms assembled with found objects, minerals, and wood, reflecting on what endures under pressure. Clay humbles you. It cracks, collapses, surprises. The kiln changes everything, often in ways you never planned. What emerges on the other side is harder, more itself, marked by everything it has endured. That is the nature of transformation: you don't choose it. You survive it, and what remains tells you who you are.

This exhibition is my attempt to sit with that. To make something in a moment that resists stillness. To ask, through form and fire, what holds in material, in culture, in people.

Pressure isn't the enemy of beauty. Sometimes it's the condition for it.”

— Larry Ossei-Mensah