Gracie Sager Tumbler

Gracie Sager is a ceramic artist inspired by clay’s powers of storytelling and historic preservation, in combination with preservation of queer identities and their place in society. Gracie creates devotional ceramic pieces, both functional and decorative, adorned in dreamy surface designs. When preparing their surface designs, they render an intuitive sketch onto their vessel, and paint layer by layer over top of it. Gracie finds inspiration for their paintings from Italian maiolica ware, illuminated manuscripts, and mythical beasts. 

Gracie portrays queerness with a combination of fantastical creatures, religious iconography, and narrative elements: reflecting its associations with the beast-like and unruly in contrast to the structure and fear surrounding religious authority. Through a combination of underglaze and overglaze painting, while occasionally glittering oxides and gritty sgraffito work, they help these stories shine through. Through their artwork, Gracie hopes to preserve the long and ever-growing history of queer joy and to feed the weird and the wonderful furthermore. 

We are thrilled to host this work as a part of our 2026 Cup Show!