The latest edition of ‘Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art’ at the Ford Foundation Gallery in NYC looks like the lush, earthy womb of a vessel filled with stunning works that evidence the power and beauty of clay, and this is exactly what curator Jareh Das intended. The show is a warm celebration of an intergenerational group of artists carrying on a visual dialogue across time and space.

The exhibition has travelled to the US for the first time following critically acclaim at Two Temple Place in London and York Art Gallery in 2022. Here, it keeps to its original mission of centring the work and legacy of Nigerian ceramicist Ladi Kwali (1925-1984), in conversation with works by later generations of Black women artists working with clay. The US edition sees the addition of works by Simone Leigh, Adebunmi Gbadebo and Anina Major, alongside those of previously exhibited artists Halima Audu, Phoebe Collings-James, Jade de Montserrat, Chinasa Vivian Ezugha, Ladi Kwali, Bisila Noha, Magdalene Odundo and Julia Phillips.

As well as this recent opening, Das is presenting a special themed section at Frieze London titled ‘Echoes in the Present’, which will explore the relationship between artists working in Brazil and Africa, and their diasporas. Among several topics, the show works towards unpacking the visual legacy and impact that colonialism and later cross-cultural exchanges have had on the way artists have approached their practice. The curation comprises Bunmi Agusto, Serigne Mbaye Camara, Diambe, Mélinda Fourn, Lilianne Kiame, Naomi Lulendo, Aline Motta, Alberto Pitta, Sandra Poulson and Tadáskía.

Memory is a theme that emerges across the two shows – whether it’s exploring the material memory of clay, the quest to preserve the memory and contributions of pioneers like Ladi Kwali, or tapping into collective memory to interrogate what we should carry with us into the future. Many of these artists are doing the important work of disentangling the societal baggage we’ve inherited in an effort to make more conscious decisions about what we hold onto.

Between the openings of these two shows, friends Ferren Gipson and Jareh Das sat down to discuss these themes.

Ferren Gipson (FG): As I was thinking about ‘Body Vessel Clay’ and your upcoming ‘Echoes in the Present’ presentation at Frieze London, there seems to be this feeling of nurturing community around both shows. Especially with Body Vessel Clay travelling with largely the same group of artists, which is really lovely.

Jareh Das (JD): Thank you. There are two thoughts that come to mind when I hear the word community around that. On one hand, this community existed way before me in terms of a community of women like Ladi Kwali and the Gbari women making these pots communally. And then now, 2025 is the centenary of Ladi Kwali’s birth and there is a new diasporic community connecting to that origin. So, this hand-building process of making in the context of where it was birthed still exists, but it's not as prominent as it used to be. But then, this diasporic Black woman's lineage has taken up this method of hand-building and coiling. And it’s a community that has extended beyond Nigeria.

FG: And it's a community across time as well, because these artists are in visual dialogue with each other across generations.

JD: Exactly. It's across time. It's across different geographical locations. What's also really interesting to me is the fact that the hand-building that existed between matrilineal and familial circles has been extended beyond to the non-familial, but it's still Black women who are really connected to this method, which is the foundation of this exhibition.

FG: I know that you had to do so much difficult ground work and research to uncover more information about Ladi Kwali and I'm wondering, since that first show, have you noticed an increase in people’s awareness of her life and work?

JD: Well, within ceramic specialist circles, Ladi Kwali was already well-known – particularly by people who are invested in British studio pottery and global ceramics histories. Magdalene Odundo has also been phenomenally instrumental in keeping Ladi Kwali’s name and legacy alive. But at the same time, what I observed around the time of the exhibition is that, outside of the specialist circles – even in the context of Nigeria – a lot of people didn’t know who Ladi Kwali is. They might have some kind of knowledge of her as the famous potter on the back of the Nigerian 20 Naira note, but not in terms of her life and her Gbari hand-building technique. Even for myself, growing up in Nigeria, Ladi Kwali was only mentioned very briefly in school.

So, I would say that through the exhibition, writing, and travelling to Ladi Kwali’s hometown, Kwali and Suleja, where she spent the rest of her life, I have observed a growing awareness of her contributions to ceramics, and also to the fact that her legacy is extending to a younger generation of artists. This includes artists like Magdalene Odundo, who I mentioned, and also Winnie Owens-Hart, who is an African-American ceramicist who spent a lot of time in Nigeria and brought the hand-coiling method into her ceramic knowledge. In her early career, Simone Leigh was also looking specifically at Nigerian pots and methods of work. She was introduced to Ladi Kwali through her research as an intern at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., looking at the African pottery collection there, and in reading Sylvia Leith-Ross’ Nigerian Pottery (1970) book. You can see that origin of influence in her way of working with clay, even though she's extended to working with different materials as well.

FG: You mention Simone Leigh, who is one of the artists you include in this latest edition of ‘Body Vessel Clay’. This is the third presentation of the show and it's in the US for the first time now. What are some of the things that are different and specific for this show?

JD: In responding to the specific space at Ford Foundation Gallery as well as the show being situated in the US, I decided to rethink the exhibition to focus on Kwali’s time in the US in 1972, when she did a demonstration tour around historically Black colleges and universities for two months with Michael Cardew and another potter from Abuja, Clement Kofi Athey. I thought of the show as a bit of a redress – asking what it would mean to represent Kwali in the context of the US, where she's not on a demonstration tour orchestrated by others, but instead representing her work on her own terms with a sense of agency.

FG: Yes! Presenting her as an artist in her own right.

JD: The addition of Simone Leigh, Anina Major and Adebunmi Gbadebo in this iteration was significant as well because I thought it was important to bring African-American artists into this conversation, given the context. And then there is the nucleus of the show: centring these vessels with intergenerational matrilineal influences. We see an early pot by Magdalene Odundo with one of Ladi Kwali’s early terracotta pots. Or we have Halima Audu’s glazed water pots with Bisila Noha’s water jar in a dialogue together. Then Anina Major, who learned raffia basket weaving from her grandmother in the Bahamas and translates that into clay. It really highlights the importance of matrilineal influences and how that connects to artists working with clay now.

There’s also new work by Phoebe Collings-James, which explores a question of sculpture-vessel-ceramics hybridity. Is it a sculpture? Is it a vessel? Phoebe's using these coiling methods for a language of sculpture. I think these are interesting tensions that happen when you start scaling up these forms. My thinking is that these categories don't actually matter – is it craft, art, or design – we’re moving beyond these formal categories.

FG: And the outdated value systems that come with them.

JD: Yes, we’re moving towards thinking of clay and ceramics more expansively. And in keeping with other scholarship that is familiar to me – performance – I’m thinking about what it means for clay to become a performative material and for artists to work with clay in a way that’s about gesture and metaphor. Jade de Montserrat, Chinasa Vivian Ezugha and Julia Phillips have each produced performance photography and performance for the camera videos that really turn to the material in itself and leave an open-ended question as to what clay can be and what it can speak to in the future.

FG: We’ve talked quite a bit about an intergenerational conversation that's happening in ‘Body Vessel Clay’, and I want to take that idea with us to touch on your upcoming Frieze show because I think it seems to be a theme that is also very present in what I've seen of ‘Echoes in the Present’.

JD: Yes, it is for sure. It's a really big thing for me to think about the conversations that happened across generations and to look at the reverberations that exist between different generations of artists that are working. It stems from a lot of private conversations I have with people who are older and also younger than me. This is something that is ever-present in my projects.

FG: And how did this show come about?

JD: ‘Echoes in the Present’ is an extension of a project that happened in Dakar in May 2024 with a friend and collaborator of mine, Aissa Dione at Galerie Atiss. We were trying to unpack questions around the relationship between Brazil and West Africa. Of course, there’s the historical fact that the transatlantic slave trade transported a lot of Africans to Brazil – Bahia, in particular. We were thinking about the legacies of that and what aspects of those legacies can be observed in the visual arts today. For example, in terms of Yoruba spirituality, what would this aesthetic expression look like in the visual arts? How might these symbols translate in artistic practice? And also thinking about events like the First World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar in 66 and Festac 77 in Lagos, where artists from across the African diaspora came to the African continent, including Afro-Brazilian artists. What were the traces of these exchanges, and how might we think about that today?

FG: And I know you’re thinking about how this is truly a two-way conversation – where exchanges are taking place both directions.

JD: In my experience having grown up in Nigeria, I know that there’s a community of people who descend from Yorubaland people who were enslaved in Brazil and came back to Nigeria when they were freed. You can see the influence of Brazil today in aspects such as Brazilian-Portuguese architecture, cuisine and culture. So, this is something that we see in ‘Echoes of the Present’, with Bunmi Augusto, who is a descendant of this legacy. Her great-grandfather returned to Nigeria from Brazil and the two sides of the family reconnected later. A lot of the work that she does around this subject is looking through her familial archive to understand her connection to Brazil.

Aline Motta is a Brazilian artist who’s spent time in Nigeria and is also exploring those familial connections to parts of her family on one side Portuguese, and on the other side African and African-Brazilian, some of whom were enslaved and of African descent. And we can look at artists like Alberto Pitta, who's from Bahia and whose mother is very prominent in the Candomblé religion. These influences come into his textile practices where he brings in Afro-Brazilian and Yoruba cosmologies into his work, but he also wants the Carnival and everyday life and culture in Bahia to be prominent.

And then a younger generation of artists, like Diambe and Tadáskía, who explore the intersection of Brazilian culture and Blackness through materials, abstraction and African-South American food roots, engaging with what that means for their understandings of their relationship to African culture. Perhaps it's through revisiting this shared heritage, shifts across time, and the movement of people across time that we can really unpack some of these interconnected colonial legacies.