When Ladi Kwali was alive, her genius was recognized in Nigeria and internationally. She was the most famous potter of her community, and her work was collected by an emir. She toured the world with her handmade Gbari pottery, demonstrating how she made it in front of big crowds and wowing audiences with her skill and the motifs — lizards, scorpions and geometric patterns — on her pots.
But her work, and her words, did not reach her international audiences directly. She was taken to Europe and the United States for demonstration tours by the English potter Michael Cardew, whom scholars have criticized; one, Lisa Bagley, described him as “a gatekeeper between African ceramists and Western audiences.” As a senior potter officer of the Nigerian colonial government, Cardew employed her, worked alongside her and learned from her, and introduced her to glazing, wheel throwing and kiln firing. Internationally, Kwali (1925-1984) and her work was mediated through him, and much of what we know of her comes through his papers and his biographer, Tanya Harrod.
So the exhibition “Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art,” where her work is presented largely among other Black women working in clay, feels like a revelation — a far clearer picture of one of Nigeria’s most famous but least seen and understood artists.
This U.S. debut of the exhibit, on view at the Ford Foundation Gallery until Dec. 6, coincides with the centenary of Kwali’s birth. The curator, Jareh Das, has spent years gathering information about Kwali’s life, personality and work, which has long been obscured, despite her fame.
Kwali’s face is on the 20 naira note — the only woman on Nigerian currency — but, as Das notes, she “holds a paradoxical position in Nigeria.” Though her name is well known there, her work is not, as most of it is in Western museums. And because she was a woman from Northern Nigeria and was not formally educated, she was excluded from Nigerian modernist discourse. That is changing, fortunately, with this exhibition and with her inclusion in major international shows like the continuing “Nigerian Modernism” exhibition at the Tate Modern in London.
“There’s a lot of celebration of her accolades, but little engagement with the pottery itself,” Das said.
“Body Vessel Clay” gathers the work of three generations of Black female artists whose work with clay reflects Kwali’s enduring influence.
Kwali was often called an artisan or craftswoman instead of an artist, and her pieces were sometimes viewed through the lens of ethnography; her pots, with references to the water pots and storage pots ubiquitous in Nigerian homes, were seen as a craft rather than art. That has emphatically changed, and now she is recognized as one of Nigeria’s foremost artists.
At the start of the show, three glazed, gleaming pots, etched with porcupine quills and textured with rope, stand under a large archival photograph of the artist at work. Another pot stands on a plinth farther in, unglazed, surrounded by similar pots made by women who worked with and under her.
The history of Kwali’s gorgeous, blooming pots, crawling with critters that almost seem to twitch, lends them a deep resonance, speaking loudly to themes of motherhood and women’s work. Outside homes in many areas of Nigeria, thirsty passers-by often help themselves to scoops of water from a large jar packed into the earth.
This exhibition gives contemporary audiences a chance to engage with Kwali’s legacy on something closer to her own terms.
Conversations between her works and those of the other artists seem to bounce around the high-ceilinged gallery: Bisila Noha’s broad-hipped “Two-Legged Vessels” calling over to Chinasa Vivian Ezugha’s photo installation documenting her performance “Uro”; two rich ceramic works by Adebunmi Gbadebo, made of clay from a South Carolina plantation where her ancestors were enslaved, speak to each other across the room.
At the far end of the gallery, you can almost hear three open-mouthed baby-bird-like sculptures by Phoebe Collings-James squawk as three smooth works that vaguely resemble women by Magdalene Odundo, a British-Kenyan artist who studied with Kwali, seem to whisper years of gossip to each other, having never been exhibited together before.
Sitting in profile in the 1959 photograph that stands sentinel over the show is Kwali. With her left arm, tattooed with her name, she tilts a large unfinished pot. With her right arm just beneath, she expertly scores it, turning a listening ear to the gallery.
Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art
Through Dec. 6, Ford Foundation Gallery, 320 East 43rd Street, Manhattan; 212-573-5000, fordfoundation.org.
Ruth Maclean is the West Africa bureau chief for The Times, covering 25 countries including Nigeria, Congo, the countries in the Sahel region as well as Central Africa.
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