Clay Has Memory: Creative Lineages from Africa

“Clay remembers from whence it came. It is from whence it came.” Motivated by the scholar Vanessa Agard-Jones’s insight, Clay Has Memory investigates how artists from Africa and its diasporas use clay to sustain the legacies of their creative predecessors.

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Photo: Joseph Hu

The exhibition highlights the intergenerational lineages that have transmitted ceramic knowledge through time and centers the contributions of women artists across  geographies and generations. It invites reflection on their continued innovation with an ancient material and challenges the social and institutional hierarchies that have historically undervalued their creative labor. Dredged from the earth and worked by human hands, clay holds the potential to serve as a literal and metaphoric repository of memory. Four intertwined themes inform the exhibition: raw material, genealogies of labor, memorial, and monument. Considered together, the artworks on view reveal craft skills and knowledge as intangible cultural heritage made material and propose new  relationships to place, tradition, and shared histories.

The artist Simone Leigh, whose work is on view in the exhibition, embraced clay in her practice for the ready accessibility of the raw material. She stated in 2022, “I was drawn to the fact that there’s clay covering the whole earth that is available to everyone, unlike so many raw materials acquired through violent extraction.” Many of the artists investigate the ways in which clay materializes the history of land and place. They are intentional about the sources of their raw material, deliberately forging connections between the earth they occupy and the vessels and sculptures they craft. For instance, Ozioma Onuzulike, based in Nsukka, Nigeria, looks to the land in his work, using molds of natural materials to create installations that investigate the collision of culture, natural resources, and the economy in his home country. In Agbada (“1,500 Brand”) (2022), those natural materials include thousands of dried palm kernels and glazed ceramic beads molded from kernels—all of which are woven with copper wire into a mesmerizing wall hanging that references the oil palm, a tree indigenous to West Africa, and the palm oil that can be extracted from it, a commodity that fueled colonization in Nigeria in the late nineteenth century.

The exhibition underscores the labor and knowledge that provide artists the power to transform clay from a raw material into a finished object. Magdalene Odundo has actively studied global ceramic traditions for decades and spends months laboring over her hand-built vessels that elegantly evoke the human form. Examining the dramatically curving water jars coil-built by Nupe women in northern Nigeria, now in numerous museum collections, she became fascinated by the vessels’ forms but also deeply aware of the colonial power structures regularly mobilized to establish those collections. Odundo has apprenticed with ceramic artists all over the world and immersed herself in different techniques. Each of her elegant, burnished sculptures is a direct result of her active study and synthesis of global and transhistorical ceramic forms and processes.

Adopting a transhistorical approach, Clay Has Memory foregrounds the enduring use of clay as a medium for commemoration by highlighting portraits that memorialize individuals. Modern and contemporary artists, such as Demas Nwoko in Nigeria, create stylized portraits in clay that reflect their deep aesthetic and conceptual engagement with the historical arts of Africa. In the 1960s Nwoko synthesized Indigenous and global traditions to develop a new visual language for the independence era. Before creating Senegalese Woman in 1966, just six years after Nigeria gained independence from colonial rule, Nwoko studied ancient Nok terracotta figures, one of sub-Saharan Africa’s oldest known sculptural traditions. Though the artist incorporated an archaizing style into his figural sculpture, his subject is a contemporary African woman. By bringing together different temporalities, Nwoko questions the role of the precolonial and colonial past in the postcolonial present. Presented in dialogue with historical works, the related approaches to coil-building bodies, modeling limbs, and fashioning adornments taken by Nwoko and other artists included in the exhibition are made visible.

Clay Has Memory also highlights artists who push the medium to its limits to construct monuments that honor histories silenced by enslavement and colonialism. The titles of Kwabena Ampofo-Anti’s fantastical architectural sculptures, such as Sumanguru Atenteben (2004), often make pan-African statements by merging his own Akan language with references to other African cultures and stories, such as the Epic of Sundiata. He also combines motifs and forms inspired by Akan ideographic symbols with Africa’s ancient architectural histories and sites, including the famed Great Mosque of Jenne in Mali, the world’s largest mud-brick structure. Together these visual references emphasize the importance of surfacing Africa’s deep past in the postcolonial era and help establish a historical foundation on which to build monuments for the future.

The artists featured in Clay Has Memory support each other through their shared commitment to sustaining ceramic knowledge from Africa. These artists uphold citational practices; they combine references to the techniques, styles, materials, and narratives of artists who have shaped their aesthetic and conceptual approaches and transform them into new forms that resonate with the present and honor the contributions of their predecessors. Considered together, the works of art included in this exhibition both reveal craft skills and intergenerational knowledge as intangible cultural heritage made material and propose the potential of clay as a living archive in the wake of diasporic rupture.

Clay Has Memory: Creative Lineages from Africa will be on view through July 3, 2027.

The exhibition is made possible by leadership support from the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support is provided by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation; the Kathleen C. Sherrerd Program Fund for American Art; the Melanie and John Clarke Exhibition Fund; the Princeton University Humanities Council’s ’69 Magic Project; Princeton University’s Africa World Initiative, Department of African American Studies, and Graduate School–Access, Diversity and Inclusion; the Virginia and Bagley Wright, Class of 1946, Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art; and the many generous contributors to the Director’s Exhibition Fund. The accompanying publication is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fund and the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University.