Gabrielle Ione Hickmon (b. 1994) is a Black woman from a middle place—Ypsilanti, MI. Her lab is a place where clay, words, and herbs meet. She is interested in body memory, waiting rooms, placekeeping, circles, the Black Midwest, ecomemory, jazz, and ocular proof.
Gabrielle’s work includes essays, ethnographic research, and coil-built ceramics. She won Bronze in the Leisure, Games, & Sport category of the 2022 Information is Beautiful Awards and First Honorable Mention in the 2022 NYU American Journalism Online Awards for her ethnographic research project, How You Play Spades is How You Play Life: Spades in the African American Community. Her writing has appeared in Vox, Condé Nast Traveler, The Baffler, The Pudding, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. She attended Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania.
Gabrielle is currently at work on The Boyne City Project, a series of works in clay chronicling her family history in Michigan which dates back to before the Great Migration, a memoir about her experience with breast cancer, zines about herbalism, and WORKING PROCESS, a series of conversations with other Black women ceramic artists about their work and process.
Gabrielle is currently in residence with John Bauer Ceramics in Cape Town, South Africa; has been in residence at Pocoapoco, Mas Palou, and Mudhouse and will soon be in residence at The Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow. In 2023, Gabrielle was awarded a fellowship to Haystack Mountain’s 5th Summer Session in Ceramics to study smoke-firing under Madoda Fani. Gabrielle works out of a studio in Ypsilanti, MI.
Copyright Gabrielle Ione Hickmon 2023.
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