Corey Pemberton: Living Well
Spanning more than 5,000 square feet and featuring more than seventy works, Living Well brings together paintings, collages, blown and kiln-formed glass, basketry, quilts, and fiber-based works created over the course of Corey Pemberton's career. It is the largest presentation of his work to date and his first solo museum exhibition. Yet despite its scale, the exhibition never feels concerned with demonstrating range for its own sake. Instead, it reveals an artist steadily returning to the same set of ideas from different angles: community, memory, lineage, identity, generosity, and the ways people sustain one another over time.
The title offers a useful place to begin. "Part of living well is like living fully and wholly and allowing yourself to go wherever you might think you might want to go," stated Mr. Pemberton during an artist talk. The statement carries an openness that feels central to the exhibition itself. Much of Mr. Pemberton's career has been shaped by a willingness to follow curiosity rather than certainty, to move toward new materials and new opportunities without knowing exactly where they might lead. The result is a body of work that feels expansive without being scattered, unified less by medium than by perspective.
That perspective began taking shape years ago, when Mr. Pemberton was an undergraduate at Virginia Commonwealth University. At the time, he imagined a future in graphic design and illustration. Then, one evening, he wandered into the university's glass studio. "I saw these two people blowing glass," he recalled. "They looked like they were having a really good time, and it felt like almost like they were dancing, and they were vibing." The memory remains vivid because it captures something larger than the discovery of a material. What attracted him was the atmosphere. Glassmaking appeared rigorous and demanding, but it also appeared communal. People were working together and they depended on one another. Those impressions stayed with him.
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The Reid Family, Corey Pemberton, 2022. Courtesy of Robin and Karl Reid. Mixed media on canvas. |
Years later, when describing the medium, he boiled the experience down to a single observation: "Glassblowing is a team sport." The phrase surfaces repeatedly as one moves through Living Well, even when there is no glass in sight. Mr. Pemberton's work consistently returns to the idea that creative lives are built through relationships. Mentors shape artists and communities sustain them. Individual achievements matter, but they rarely happen alone. That understanding helps explain the remarkable breadth of the exhibition.
Visitors encounter quilts and baskets alongside paintings and glass sculptures. Forms and motifs appear in one material before resurfacing somewhere unexpected. The work moves comfortably between traditions that are often separated in museums and academic disciplines, yet the exhibition never feels fragmented. Instead, it reveals an artist following ideas wherever they lead.
For many years, Mr. Pemberton questioned whether moving across mediums would make his practice appear unfocused. Guidance came from artist Holly Roberts, who encouraged him to trust the instincts that were already shaping his work. "Trust yourself. Follow the idea wherever it wants to go and know that whatever that idea is, it's going to be filtered through a lens, a filter that is you, and when it comes out, it's going to make sense." In retrospect, the advice seems prophetic.
Looking across the galleries, Mr. Pemberton sees continuity where he once worried about difference. "There's paintings, and there's glass, and there's baskets. And there's quilts, but it's all through the same lens," he explains. That lens is particularly visible in the way he approaches tradition. Throughout Living Well, historical craft practices are not treated as static artifacts or sources of nostalgia. Instead, they are presented as living forms of knowledge, shaped by generations of makers and continually renewed through use. Quilt patterns become visual language. Basketry offers lessons in structure and repetition. Glass serves as both material and metaphor. Across mediums, the exhibition reflects an artist interested in how knowledge travels and how cultural memory endures.
Mr. Pemberton speaks about those influences with gratitude rather than ownership. "What I really love about craft is that we're often encouraged to celebrate those connections and to make work that is in response to the makers who came before us."
It is a perspective that runs counter to the persistent idea that artists must constantly reinvent themselves. Mr. Pemberton seems less interested in originality as a performance than in contribution. The question is not whether something has been done before, but what can be added to an ongoing conversation. "Considering my addition to the greater story," he said, "is a lot less pressure than going into the studio and thinking, I'm going to make something brand new." The comment resonates beyond the exhibition. It speaks to a broader understanding of culture itself, particularly within Black creative traditions, where innovation has often emerged through adaptation, continuation, and exchange. Legacy is not something fixed in the past, but it is something carried forward. The same could be said of the values that shaped Mr. Pemberton's life long before he became an artist.
Throughout his artist talk, he repeatedly returned to family, describing a close-knit support system that encouraged both independence and interdependence. Among the lessons that stayed with him was one that sounds simple but has informed much of what followed. "My parents taught me that it is always good and okay to ask for help when you need it." The statement helps explain the ease with which he speaks about mentors, collaborators, and advocates. Their presence is woven throughout his story. Rather than presenting success as a solitary achievement, Mr. Pemberton treats it as the product of many relationships accumulated over time.
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Winding Down, Corey Pemberton, 2020. Courtesy of the Collection of Sara Travis Luster. Mixed media on canvas. |
That perspective also shaped his understanding of identity and representation. As his career developed, mentors encouraged him to think more deeply about his own experiences and what they could contribute to his work. The process led him toward greater clarity about the stories he wanted to tell and the perspectives he wanted to bring into conversations about craft and contemporary art. "I started down that journey of figuring out why my experience is significant and worth sharing with the world."
The work that emerged from that journey feels personal, but it rarely turns inward. Instead, it uses individual experience as a way of engaging broader questions about belonging, visibility, and cultural memory. The exhibition repeatedly asks viewers to consider whose stories are preserved, whose labor is recognized, and how communities maintain connections across time.
Those questions eventually led Mr. Pemberton beyond his own studio practice. In 2016, conversations with artist Annie Evelyn about barriers within craft education and professional development evolved into what would become Crafting the Future, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating pathways for artists from historically underrepresented backgrounds. "There just felt like a distinct lack of representation," Mr. Pemberton recalled.
The organization's growth reflects a conviction that artistic talent alone is rarely enough to sustain a creative career. "Talent is one thing, but you need resources. You need a network of all sorts of community and systems in order to actually make a career as an artist," Mr. Pemberton declared. It is a practical observation, but it also reflects a consistent theme running throughout Mr. Pemberton's work. The health of a creative ecosystem cannot be separated from the opportunities available within it. If artists need community to thrive, then building that community becomes meaningful work in its own right. Over time, that belief has expanded Mr. Pemberton's role from artist to advocate, mentor, organizer, and leader. Yet he speaks about those responsibilities with the same spirit that informs his studio practice. "I am good at connecting with people, and I think that that is a really important part of everything that I do."
By the end of Living Well, that word begins to feel like a key to the exhibition itself. The galleries are filled with beautiful objects, but the exhibition is ultimately about relationships: relationships between teachers and students, artists and communities, traditions and innovation, past and future. The works on view demonstrate technical skill and creative ambition, yet they also point toward something larger. Again and again, they suggest that a meaningful creative life is not built through individual achievement alone.
The title Living Well gradually takes on a deeper meaning. What first appears to be the name of an exhibition becomes a way of understanding the life behind it. The work argues, quietly but persuasively, that creativity flourishes in community, that generosity can be a form of artistic practice, and that the most lasting contributions often extend beyond what is made in the studio. The exhibition offers a portrait of an artist at a significant moment in his career, but it also offers something broader: a vision of creative life rooted in stewardship, connection, and care. And in a moment when those qualities can feel increasingly scarce, that vision may be among the exhibition's most valuable gifts.♦
Corey Pemberton's Living Well is on view at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, through January 31, 2027.