Exhibition by Toussaint J. Miller
Fusion Arts is excited to present Measured Truths: an exhibition by Toussaint J. Miller. This exhibition is showcasing at Fusion Arts in 15 Park End Street from 4-12 June 2026.
The exhibition features eight ceramic sculptures varying deliberately in scale — from works exceeding five feet to pieces smaller than thirteen inches. Each responds to a specific historical case study in which material culture — photography, anatomical illustration, clinical documentation — was weaponised to dehumanise and fix the Black body within narratives of racial hierarchy. The scale of each work plays an important role in the argument: the largest pieces assert a physical presence that refuses comfortable distance, while the smallest demand an intimate, close looking that mirrors the clinical scrutiny they interrogate.
Modern medicine presents itself as a beacon of scientific objectivity — a discipline oriented, above all, towards healing. Yet beneath this narrative of progress lies a history that demands reckoning: at the root of modern medicine sits a sustained practice of scientific racism that extracted knowledge from enslaved Black bodies while simultaneously denying those bodies their humanity. My own research has traced this violence into some of its most intimate instruments — the camera, the diagram, the clinical gaze — each conscripted into a project of objectification, pathologization, and racial denigration that shaped the visual culture of modern medicine.
This exhibit does not seek to reject medicine's achievements, but to hold them honestly — to ask what it means to benefit from a practice built, in part, on subjugation. The work gathered here traces that history as an act of acknowledgement and, perhaps, the beginning of reconciliation.
The works emerge from a deeply personal artistic lineage drawing on Afro-centric sculptural, architectural, ceramic, and material traditions — not as historical footnotes, but as living sources. The cowrie shell, the wunkirmian sculptures of the Dan peoples, the mosque architecture of Djenné in medieval Mali, the 19th-century vessels of David Drake — these shape the formal and spiritual vocabulary of the work itself. To invoke them is to affirm what pseudoscientific racial hierarchies — which medicine reified and made respectable — implicitly worked to obscure: that the Black body has always existed within cultures of profound complexity, creativity, and meaning. These are not simply symbols or monuments, but a living formal language — familiar cultural touchstones reanimated through a visual and material practice that brings them into a genuinely new relationship with one another, and with this history.
About Toussaint J. Miller
Toussaint J. Miller is a multidisciplinary artist working across ceramics, music, and the histories of science and medicine. His ceramic practice interrogates how visual culture shapes narratives of race and medical history. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, Miller’s work is grounded in autoethnographic methods, exploring Afrocentric perspectives through lived experience. His practice forms part of a broader inquiry developed through his Masters in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the University of Oxford, examining medical ethics and representations of Black subjects in American medicine. His abstract sculptural forms reframe these histories, foregrounding humanity often obscured within archival records.
