This Local Artist Uses Ceramics to Explore Her Identity and Connect with Other Artists of Color

Eleanor Bishop

Felipe at the Dairy Barn Arts Center with one of her ceramic pieces. Photo by Joe Timmerman

April D. Felipe doesn’t like to set limits on her art. Her more than 20-year career has allowed her craft to grow and change as frequently as she does.

Today, armed with a plastic bag bursting with colored cloth, she will be a creator of felt mermaids.

“I have three very sassy ladies coming in today,” she says. Felipe gestures to a shelf of misshapen figures in an upstairs studio of The Dairy Barn Arts Center. “Those weird things that look like random voodoo dolls will eventually be their little mermaids.”

Felipe has shown work in exhibitions across the country and taught art courses at Ohio University and Ohio State University. In 2017, she was named an Emerging Artist by Ceramics Monthly magazine. She is currently splitting her time between teaching children’s classes at The Dairy Barn and ARTS/West and working at her home studio in Albany, Ohio.

Although Felipe has stayed in the region since receiving her Master of Fine Arts from OU in 2010, rural Ohio is a world away from her first home. Felipe was born and raised in Queens, New York. As a child, she never wanted to do anything but make art.

“There’s nothing cooler than a serious 14-year-old artist,” Felipe says with a laugh.

She left the city in 1999 to earn her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Alfred University in western New York. Initially planning to study puppetry, she soon found herself drawn to ceramics. “To this day I’ve always ended up working in ceramics,” she says. “It’s a medium that can be manipulated into so many other things.”

Felipe’s 2019 porcelain and cotton thread sculpture, “Seed.” Photos provided by Felipe.

She typically works with ceramic pieces in mixed media, collage pieces. “I’m slightly ungrateful toward [the medium], because I’m a little stubborn with it,” Felipe says. “[For me] it isn’t really about clay, it’s about a material being able to facilitate a narrative or a story you’re telling.”

Her work often deals with questions of identity and belonging. Although Felipe’s mother is Puerto Rican and her father is Dominican, Felipe’s fair skin and straight hair mean that she is not always “visually verified” as Latin American. This experience left her with complex feelings about her own identity.

“It’s happened since I was very little, so that’s something that stays with you,” Felipe says. “And it seems inconsequential but it’s really about wanting to belong and the denial of belonging — even if you actually belong.”

In the last six years, Felipe started incorporating images of ducks and humans with duck bills into her sculptures, inspired by the story of “The Ugly Duckling,” where a young bird raised by ducks is bullied for looking different. The “duckling” eventually grows into a beautiful swan and flies away to join a flock of swans — his “real” family.

“I think it’s a messed-up thing [in the story] that when you do belong it’s like, ‘Oh, you’ve found your own kind and that’s where you’ll be happy,’” she says. With her art, Felipe explores an alternative ending. “What happens if the duck was just a duck?” she says. “What if it wasn’t a swan? I liked that character.”

After finishing her undergraduate degree, Felipe returned to New York and worked for four years as a student liaison for Greenwich House Pottery in Greenwich Village before deciding to earn her M.F.A. at OU in 2007. At OU, Felipe expected her professors to push her to make the best work possible, and they did not disappoint.

“It was one of the most challenging experiences I’ve been through,” she says. Receiving criticism from her professors made Felipe feel extremely vulnerable. “It’s not like getting a math question wrong,” Felipe says. “When you’re critiqued for your work, because it is so personal, your ego is really tied into it.”

Brad Schwieger, a professor of ceramics at OU, has seen Felipe’s art evolve since her time as a student. He says that an important part of her growth came from learning to move beyond work that exclusively dealt with personal narratives.

“She’s always been interested in heritage and her family tree, that was kind of what drove her work when she was first here,” he says. “But she’s [gone] from a more personal family [perspective] to seeing a much bigger, cultural picture as an artist.”

Schwieger says that this struggle to see beyond the individual is common for young artists. “They haven’t lived that long, they don’t know that much and they don’t have that much to say, which is why we learn to research and come up with an idea,” he says. “[April’s] aptitude for research has certainly become more successful.”

In her recent work, extensive research has helped her draw universal ideas out of personal narratives. “I relate it almost to music,” she says. “Music can express a personal narrative, but hopefully there’s also a universal theme that can connect with other people. And a lot of the narratives that I feel like I’ve been working with over the last couple of years have been about how you feel you exist within the world … for me that conversation has become a bit of a cultural conversation.”

Felipe’s 2017 porcelain sculpture, “And You as Well.”

One element of that cultural conversation comes from the bright and intricate patterns that characterize her ceramics. Those are inspired by the designs used in Caribbean cast cement floors. The popular process in the islands gives concrete floors the illusion of being tiled, and therefore more European.

“I love these tiles because they’re not tiles,” Felipe says. “I’m very interested in things that are both real and not real [and] the way narratives and stories are subjective.”

She says that by researching those patterns, she has traced their origins to Moorish art, a variation of Islamic art originating in North Africa. She enjoys the strange irony of the discovery.

“In trying to remove oneself from your slave and Indigenous cultures by presenting yourself in a more European fashion, if you dig deep enough in the story … you’re actually connecting yourself back with the thing that you were originally trying to deny,” Felipe says. ‘What’s important and what isn’t? And how do we reframe those narratives?”

After earning her M.F.A., Felipe met her now-partner, who owns a business building and repairs guitars in the Athens area. She has lived in the region ever since.

Besides teaching classes and making her own work, Felipe has been making strides to open doors for other artists like her. In 2018, she teamed up with fellow artists Yinka Orafidiya, Salvador Jimenez-Flores and Natalia Arbelaez to form The Color Network, an online database and mentorship program for artists of color specializing in work with clay. Felipe and her co-founders hope to increase the visibility of artists of color in the field of ceramics, combatting the Euro-centric focus common in arts education.

“Historically I would say a large amount of cultures deal with ceramics,” she says. “Anywhere that has a riverbed has made something with clay ... so why is it when you’re in school, you only learn about maybe three aspects of that history?”

Felipe knows that it can be hard for young people to imagine a path in any field, particularly the arts, when there is not an example to follow.

“History is just a narrative that we selectively choose from in order to create the story that allows us to propel ourselves forward,” she says. “I think [seeing other artists of color] validates your interests … If you can’t find your narrative, how can you defend it?”