Diani Beach, Kenya (December 2023)
London, U.K. (1968)
Playa Mujeres, Mexico (August 2009)
IN MEMORIAM
YVETTE BURGESS-POLCYN
(January 21, 1938–February 22, 2024)
Yvette Cecile Burgess-Polcyn was a master ceramicist who lived as she worked — fiercely, but always with grace, intellect, and devotion.
A lifelong educator, scholar, world-traveler, and potter, her hands transformed not only clay but also countless lives, spiritual communities, and artistic futures. Her ceramic vessels were bold yet contemplative. Rooted in deep ancestral heritage, her work remained strikingly modern, revealing a life steeped in transcendent art, enduring faith, and the power of transformation.
After completing her undergraduate education at Morgan State in 1960, she spent four years in West Africa serving in the Peace Corps as an educator working with local communities. In the late 1960s, she moved to London before finally returning to the states full-time.
Yvette began learning to make pottery in the 1970s at Riverside Church on the Upper Westside of Manhattan in New York City. She would migrate to the renowned ceramics studio at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she received two Masters Degrees, and her learning and love of the craft of pottery grew. It was at Columbia University’s affectionately named “TC,” she found a second home and refined her craft as a ceramicist.
Over the next four and half decades, she merged artistic mastery with spiritual traditions. With unrelenting dedication, she worked her hands steadily until 2015, when her journey was slowed by late onset Alzheimer’s Disease, from which she would pass in 2024. But, even in stillness, her work continued to speak — laying testament to her creative spirit that never ceased to inspire and whose legacy still perseveres.
A practitioner of the Yoruba religion and a priestess of Obatala, the Yoruba Orisha to whom she was ceremonially initiated in May 1983, Yvette’s art was an offering of faith as much as it was form. She fused her love of pottery with her spiritual devotion, imbuing each piece with an ancestral power drawn from West African traditions that sought balance, clarity, and guidance from the divine in each of her creations.
She traversed continents and disciplines — from New York to Nigeria, Cairo to London — and her influence as a professor, spiritual practitioner, and artist extended across generations, as she taught us how to see art as both a language and a liberation.
Those who knew her remember her sharp wit, regal presence, and curious mind. Her pottery, like her own spiritual and earthly embodiments, hold both lightness and weight, and her work are artifacts of a woman who found transcendence in the union of earth and spirit. She inscribed each piece with both her given name, Yvette, and her Yoruba one — Obubi. And she included the year of each work’s creation.
The Elegant Pot is not simply a pottery store; it is a living archive of my mother’s art and her faith. It is a continuation of her dialogue with the world. And her vessels remain emissaries of her love and her belief that art is an act of reverence.
Now, I have the honor of preserving and curating her life’s work through The Elegant Pot, which exists as a living archive of her spiritual vision and creative legacy. Each vessel presented here stands as both artwork and heirloom, carrying forward my mother’s power of language and craftsmanship in communion with our ancestors.
She reminds us that we all live on, through every act of remembrance and in reshaping every person we touch, like timeless hands upon earthly clay.