Trevor Noah Enlists Ceramic Artist to Give His Desk Mug a Makeover

Most talk show hosts and their guests always have a run-of-the-mill mug on hand. The Daily Show is no exception, but this month, host Trevor Noah will be changing things up a bit. Noah has enlisted Lolly Lolly Ceramics founder Lalese Stamps to create a limited collection of 100 mugs in three different styles to be debuted on three Thursdays in a row starting on March 3 in honor of Women’s History Month. The designs will be available for purchase on Lolly Lolly’s website and will appear on Noah’s desk on The Daily Show.

Stamps founded Lolly Lolly in 2020 and calls the business “an overnight success.” She and her small team hand make a variety of items in her Milwaukee studio, and the inspiration for The Daily Show designs comes from a project she did in 2019 called the 100 Mug Project. “It has been my sort of claim to fame. I designed and created 100 mugs in 100 days with 100 different handles,” she tells AD. “They are each unique as individual mugs, but even more impactful as a whole.” The three handles selected for The Daily Show mugs made the cut because they are “interesting, but also very functional,” she explains.

Currently, Stamps is one of four artists participating in a ceramics residency in New York City facilitated by Saint Heron, the creative agency founded by Solange Knowles in 2013. Stamps says the experience has been helpful when it comes to creating pieces of a larger scale, but that the biggest reward has been collaborating with the other artists, Armina Howada Mussa, Dina Nur Satti, and Kenya Cree, and the teachers, Tracie Hervy and Anina Major.

“The best part has hands down been the connections I’ve made with other Black ceramic artists. To work in a space with like-minded women who are on similar journeys feels so unfamiliar to me,” says Stamps. “I really value Solange’s initiatives of creating spaces for Black creatives outside of the standard institutions that we have been accustomed to. ”