Ross Junior Owusu is a Mix-media artist and an educator born in Ghana. He holds an MFA from Wayne State University (WSU) and a B.A in Industrial Art (Ceramic Option) from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Ghana.
Ross has been in several exhibitions and Awards including; Finalist for the 2025 Detroit Artist Market Annual Scholarship Awards and Exhibition at the Detroit Historic Museum, Y’akyi Nnwa; Let’s have a conversation, Daum Museum, Missouri, the NCECA Multicultural Fellowship exhibition 2025, Memento nos: Migration and movement in America by the Homer and Dolly Hand Art Center, Stetson university, Florida and the Todd Art Gallery in Mid-south Tennessee University.
Ross is a 2025 John F. Korachis Scholarship Award recipient, the Watershed Zenobia Awardee and the Thomas C. Rumble Fellowship recipient.
My practice spans ceramics, performance, and mixed media, grounded in an exploration of identity, migration, and cultural memory. I am deeply interested in how the movement of people—whether chosen or forced—reshapes both external environments and internal landscapes. Rooted in personal and collective histories, my work investigates how we carry, adapt, and reconstruct notions of self and belonging across shifting geographies.
Clay is central to my practice, not only for its tactile and transformative qualities, but also for its symbolic ties to land, history, and resilience. Its malleability mirrors the experience of migration—the constant becoming, un-becoming, and re-becoming of identity. I often draw from West African symbolism, working with modular or repeatable forms such as scaled-up Krobo bead shapes, which are reconfigured to evoke both architectural structures and emotional states. These arrangements serve as metaphors for self-discovery, reinvention, transformation, fragmentation, memory, and continuity.
My surfaces are activated through expressive glaze techniques—crawl glazes, lava textures, and saturated colors—that function as emotional and conceptual markers. The interplay between geometric repetition and organic variation reflects the tension between structure and spontaneity, inheritance and innovation. I also integrate reclaimed materials and earthy tones inspired by African mud house traditions, emphasizing the enduring imprint of cultural memory and the grounding power of materiality.
My approach is both experimental and intimate, often embracing imperfection and process as a way of speaking to the labor of navigating dual identities and cultural negotiation. As an international artist living between worlds, my work becomes a dialogue—a container for memory, a vessel for transformation, and a site for connection. It invites reflection on what we hold onto, what we let go of, and how we continually shape ourselves in response to place, displacement, and the longing for home.