Gordon Robichaux is pleased to present Renewal, Reverend Joyce McDonald’s third solo exhibition at the gallery and her first since her retrospective exhibition at the Bronx Museum earlier this year. McDonald dedicates the show to family with an opening on Mother’s Day and a closing on Father’s Day.

Renewal unites ten of McDonald’s figurative sculptures created over the past four decades, several of which have never been previously exhibited. Each of the artist’s intimate artworks, which she refers to as “testimonial sculptures,” memorializes a person, experience, memory, or vision that McDonald translates into clay and adorns with humble materials such as paper towels, costume pearls, scraps of fabric, plastic plant sprigs, small rocks, and fragments of jewelry. The artist’s process is therapeutic, and the works resonate with emotional immediacy, spiritual energy, and the conviction of McDonald’s faith, which inspires their creation. As she has shared: “When I make art, I touch the clay and my hands move. I don’t know what I’m going to make—the Spirit guides me.”

Material and spiritual transformation is the wellspring of McDonald’s art. Renewal enshrines these themes within the literal and symbolic space of a garden constructed within the gallery in a large, raised box filled with soil, flowers, and plants. Six of the artist’s clay figures are displayed among cycles of bloom and buds—a microcosm of care and life. Three clay relief portraits and a calendar hang on the walls surrounding the garden. Produced by Visual AIDS and Abbott Laboratories in 1999, the Positively Art calendar features a tableau photograph titled In the Spirit of Life, which depicts two of McDonald’s sculptures in a flowerbed of petunias. The image is one in a series of photographs created in 1998 in collaboration with Robert Morrissey, resident art therapist at The Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services, where McDonald began making art within a day treatment program for people living with HIV. Morrisey worked with McDonald to stage her sculptures within a flowerbed, which they photographed and submitted to Visual AIDS’s calendar competition (1). McDonald recalls:

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At that time, I was creating art at the Jewish Board of Family Services in Brooklyn in the day program, and I carried my art around in a box. I entered a competition for my art to be included in Visual AIDS’s calendar, with photos of my sculptures in a flowerbed that were taken on Myrtle Avenue, in Downtown Brooklyn, near the Jewish Board. I won a $1,000 award, and my art was included in the calendar. It was deep: The larger sculpture in the picture is my mother—she’s pregnant and dressed up—and the smaller figure is a nurse, and they are surrounded by flowers.

McDonald’s art was chosen to represent the month of August in the calendar, and the image celebrates her mother during a pregnancy, attended by a nurse. Situated among the flowers, the figures’ expressions are serene, and their clothing is embellished with shimmering gold details. A quote by McDonald, who then used the last name Washington, further contextualizes the profound relationship between the artist’s life and artmaking: “As the womb nourishes the unborn, as the mother protects the child, so the rebirth of my creativity in this time of AIDS sustains life.”

Renewal is an affirmation of McDonald’s deeply felt beliefs rooted in faith and family. Several of the sculptures displayed in the gallery’s garden are single figures that exude serenity and connection, their gazes oriented up toward the divine. Planted Firm (1998) is a radiant female who resembles a sacred icon. Her body, clothing, and hair are painted iridescent gold, and she kneels comfortably on the ground holding a sprig from a green plant—a mythic symbol of life and rebirth. Precious in His Hands (2020) depicts a woman swathed in aureate robes and embraced by a hand as large as her body. The two beings are articulated from a single lump of clay, while a strand of lustrous pearls weaves between them, suggesting a state of divine protection.

McDonald also invokes spiritual fortification in The Family That Pray (2001), a huddle of four interconnected clay figures whose clothes she crafted from scraps of fabric. The group stands facing each other, their arms locked in a loving embrace. A relief work that hangs nearby on the wall of the gallery, Starlette (2022), memorializes the artist’s niece, who died prematurely from cancer. McDonald rendered her face in a state of peaceful repose, her eyes lined with soft artificial eyelashes and shimmering glitter that imbue the clay with life and emotion. Erin and Kayla (My Granddaughters) (2020) is displayed on a small table in the corner of the gallery, which the artist covered with a floral doily and a piece of sheer black fabric with metallic details. The Janus sculpture features opposing faces united in their shared heritage.

Chain of Love (2026) is one of two artworks in the exhibition that exemplify McDonald’s recent exploration of glazed and fired ceramic. The relief presents a multifaceted female bust with a dark iridescent luster glaze and burnt orange hair, which the artist embellished with a chain of black-and-white pearls. The sculpture also incorporates a Janus form, with two faces clearly describing different phases of life: youth and maturity. Two additional faces appear to emerge below the neck: one defined only by a set of lips and a chin, and another, an infant’s head tucked behind the shoulder. The tender sculpture embodies the complexity of identity and experience; the passage of time; and the continuum of memory, love, life, and spirit.

1. Kyle Croft, Reverend Joyce McDonald: MINISTRY (New York: Visual AIDS, 2025), 13–14.