Anina Major: Lasting Radiance at The Future Perfect

Bahamian artist Anina Major is showing her first solo presentation in New York, Lasting Radiance, at The Future Perfect in NoHo from November 3, 2026 to January 1, 2027. Her practice is rooted in the Bahamian tradition of palm-leaf plaiting, which she learned from her grandmother, the straw weaver Saphora Newbold. Major has long translated those inherited hand gestures into lasting sculptural forms in clay and glass. Here she moves that language of plaiting into design, with works that give off light, reflect, and live inside a domestic interior.

The centerpiece is Tears of a Light Catcher, a large suspended constellation of six woven ceramic light structures with hand-blown glass drops. The structures are made of glazed and stained stoneware that incorporates melted sea glass. They recall the crowded ceilings of Caribbean tourist marketplaces, where handmade goods hang overhead. Light passes through the woven forms and bounces across the bubbled, teardrop-shaped glass, producing shifting patterns of brightness and shadow. The work pairs luminosity with vulnerability and suggests that fragility and brilliance are not opposites.

Above the townhouse fireplace hangs Seen, a sculptural mirror with a glazed stoneware frame that loosely traces the outline of New Providence, the island where Major was born. The same contour reads as an eye. The eye looks outward and the mirror sends the gaze back, so the viewer becomes both observer and subject, and looking at oneself becomes tied to the question of where one is looking from.

Along the shelving, sculptures sit in individual alcoves, among them Salt Water Tears, Poured at the Root, Black Sun and Wounds into Silver. Read as a connected sequence, they draw on imagery of tears, celestial bodies, transformation and renewal. Wishing Well II and Mercury Rising are also on display. Each piece can be taken in alone, while relationships emerge across the whole arrangement.

Major cites Salvador Dalí's Mae West Room as a reference for the show's playful link between sculpture and domestic space. The interior is not treated as a neutral backdrop. Objects speak to one another, and the boundaries between artwork, furnishing and architecture grow fluid. The exhibition proposes that objects can become part of daily life without giving up their sculptural or conceptual weight.