About

Hadiya Williams is a Washington, DC-based multidisciplinary artist and designer working across ceramics, surface design, print, and digital processes. Her work explores ancestry, cultural memory, and material culture, with particular attention to the objects, patterns, and visual traditions that shape Black domestic life. Drawing from family history, African and African diasporic design traditions, and the material culture she grew up around, Williams uses object-making as a way to consider how history and memory are carried through everyday things.

 

Moving between hand-built ceramics, functional objects, pattern, printmaking, and digital fabrication, Williams creates work that sits between art, craft, and design. Her practice often begins with research and experimentation, translating references from family photographs, decorative arts, interiors, and archival material into contemporary forms. Across these different processes, she is interested in the ways objects can hold personal histories while also speaking to larger cultural experiences.

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Williams was born and raised in Washington, DC and spent nearly two decades working in visual communications before establishing Black Pepper Paperie Co. in 2017 and transitioning into a full-time studio practice. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Her ceramic work is held in the permanent collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Her work and studio practice have also been featured in The New York Times, Domino, Business of Home, and Design Milk.