Body Vessel Clay reviews

Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art traces how Black women artists have transformed the field of ceramics over the past seventy years-disrupting conventions, challenging hierarchies, and expanding the possibilities of clay as a medium. On view September 10 through December 6, the exhibition brings together three generation of groundbreaking Black women artists whose work with clay explores the medium's multilayered cultural and political significance.

Published inART AFRICA | August 25, 2025

Interview with Stephan Rheeder

With over fifty works encompassing ceramics, photography, film, and archival material, the show explores clay as a medium and metaphor for memory, lineage, resistance, and transformation. Following acclaimed presentations in London and York, this U.S. debut coincides with the centenary of Kwali's birth, offering a sharper focus on her matrilineal knowledge and global impact. In this interview, Das shares her curatorial vision for bridging past and present, creating connections across geographies, and centering forms of expertise often excluded from the ceramic canon. Read full interview here

Published inSurface Magazine | September 16, 2025

By Jenna Adrian-Diaz

Befitting its U.S. debut, this edition of "Body Vessel Clay" sees the addition of works by three American artists: Adebunmi Gbadebo, Simone Leigh, and Anina Major. The practices of all exhibiting artists are woven to the boundary-breaking work of Nigerian potter Ladi Dosei Kwali, the first female student of the Pottery Training Centre. Kwali married diasporic traditions with studio-learned techniques of glazing and kiln firing to great acclaim. "I originally envisioned them when I began expanding my research on Ladi Kwali and matrilineal pottery legacies as they relate to Black women and wider Black histories," Dr. Das tells Surface of Gbadebo, Leigh, and Major. Read full feature here

Published inHyperallergic | September 30, 2025

Born in 1925, the potter [Ladi Kwali] created water pots and a range of ceramics between the 1950s and the '70s in Abuja (since renamed Suleja), Nigeria, connecting the intimacy of household vessels with the broader recognition of clay as an artistic medium. Each of the three water pots, produced from 1959 to 1962, is formed through a traditional coil method, resulting in a soft, earthy sheen. In the first gallery, these objects are contextualized by archival photographs and publications documenting Nigerian pottery and Kwali's career, underscoring how her practice was locally rooted and globally recognized.

Published inThe New Yorker | October 1, 2025

By Doreen St. Félix

And at the Ford Foundation, Gbadebo's work is displayed again, in the exhibit "Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics, & Contemporary Art," alongside Simone Leigh, Phoebe Collings-James, and other contemporaries. Curated by Dr. Jareh Das, a researcher in clay and its connection to the body, the show makes the refreshing statement about a parallel movement in clay, centered not on Voulkos but on the Nigerian potter Ladi Dosei Kwali, a master alchemist of Gbari design and British studio technique. Like Kwali, or, perhaps, after Kwali, Gbadebo uses a coiling technique, working her own body around the clay, as opposed to standing still and having the clay spin and spin. Considering the provenance of the clay, Gbadebo is spinning her own self. Read full feature here

Published inNATAAL | October 8, 2025

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. Read full interview here

Published inCNN | October 8, 2025

By Suyin Haynes

Another artist now receiving recognition further afield is the potter and ceramicist Ladi Kwali, whose portrait appears on the 20 Nigerian naira note. Born in the Gbari region of northern Nigeria, Kwali became the first female trainee at the Pottery Training Centre in Abuja in 1954, and is known for infusing her modern ceramics training with traditional influences. Read full feature here