Boston-area artist Paul S. Briggs creates clay forms that address issues about mass incarceration, community, beauty, and resilience. Working primarily with pinch-forming and slab-building processes, Briggs' work is about art making as inner development, broadly understood. He creates distinctive, high relief pinch-formed ceramic vessels and penetrating slab-built sculptural forms; both genres often have interior space. Briggs’ most recent slab-formed works are “Knot Stories,” that unpack the importance of language in shaping ideologies about beauty and community; “Cell Personae,” dramatizing the impact of incarceration on Black lives, and “Poetic Justice,” a series that looks to the resilience of Black life in America through the coupling of sculpture and poetry. 

Briggs' work is frequently and widely exhibited across the country, and belongs to the collections of the Flaten Art Museum, St. Olaf College; the Fuller Craft Museum, Brockport, Mass.; and the Legacy Museum, Equal Justice Initiative, Montgomery, Ala.; among many others.