ABOUT
Carlynne Ceramics advances access to quality mental health care for Black and multiethnic communities by providing a non-traditional infrastructure for therapy, creativity, cultural processing, and advocacy.
We envision a world where people of color are provided access to healing, development without judgment, and a space to creatively explore free from the oppressive gaze.
CULTURE CENTERED
Carlynne Ceramics challenges how a health system should look and feel .
Detaching from traditional system models, we innovatively create healing communities that make the process of therapy more approachable. We center the voices, identities, and experiences of people of color at the core of their care.
CHANGING THE NARRATIVE
Carlynne Ceramics makes sustained investments in growing a community of multiracial, multigenerational, and multidisciplinary individuals committed to societal change by supporting their artmaking, mental health, and community building.
By providing community-centered, art therapeutic programs, we bridge the gap between treatment approaches and cultural needs. We aim to create a mental health space that better cultivates cultural inclusivity; one that considers its racialized history, and transubstantiates White-centric methods.
ABOUT NALA C. TURNER
Nala C. Turner is a Brooklyn-based visual artist, culture worker, and creative art therapist (MPS, LCAT, LCPAT, ATR-BC), working across multiple disciplines of art-making and healing such as ceramics, sculpture, somatics, and art therapy. She has 15 years of experience working with clay as a visual artist and 10 years as an educator, previously serving as a family programs educator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, along with various other educational and career development spaces.
As a visual artist, her work aims to instigate conversations exploring perception and time. Specifically how the individual and collective are perceived both within the bounds of culture, and the boundlessness of history. Often pulling from her own experiences and rooted in realities kindred to Black people, Turner's work seeks out and utilizes history, rituals, and identities recognizable within Black culture to investigate culturally restricting barriers and transubstantiate the representation of Black people within popular culture. Turner uses her work as a space to question social practices of representation and the frequent racial stereotypes it perpetuates. Through clay-work, she looks to reauthor historical narrative, self-perception, and cultural understanding.
Turner's most recent work, Healing Landscapes (2024), is an interactive diptych created for the 2024 Socrates Park Annual Fellowship (on view). Her collaborative projects include Queen City (2023) by Nekisha Durrett, a large-scale public art installation and memorial addressing the 1941 seizure of Black-owned land for the Pentagon’s construction and the displacement of 903 residents. In 2020, Turner was commissioned to design and sculpt New York’s The Town Hall’s first inaugural Lena Horne Prize for Artists Creating Social Impact award, celebrating Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter and visual artist, Solange Knowles.
As a creative arts therapist, Turner has explored the ardor of various mediums within both educational and mental health forums, including institutional, non-profit, and private-practice settings. Turner’s mission is to to share clay-work’s ability to create a symbol of one’s inner world and living experiences, to bring insight to one’s Self, and its contributions to overall healing and wellbeing through sublimative integration.
Turner holds a M.P.S. in Art Therapy and Creativity Development from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY; and previously received her B.A. in Psychology and a B.F.A in Ceramics from Truman State University in Kirksville, MO.