Here’s Douglas Dawson of the Douglas Dawson Gallery of Chicago giving a short (and we mean short) lesson on the art of African pot making. Dawson, whose gallery specializes in nonwestern ethnographic art, uses five minutes to tell you several dozen interesting things about the culture surrounding pot-making in Africa. He then wraps it up by describing a large vessel, appearing in the video to read its different qualities like a book. This video came out just prior to a show about African pottery at the Speed Art Museum.
Above image: Douglas Dawson in a screenshot from a video for the Speed Art Museum.
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While Douglas Dawson has done a wonderful job in introducing a generation of collectors to the diversity and cultural depth of African ceramics, I must strongly object to the statement that there will “in two decades” be no traditional pottery in production.
There are families of African potters producing work today that is critical to domestic, ceremonial, and aesthetic use. I am an expert of Zulu ceramics and can speak to the continued importance of Zulu wares in the practice of serving guests at social functions and in presenting beer to one’s ancestors. Another type of container simply won’t do for the majority of people honoring their ancestors in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
But more importantly, even artists who are producing work for galleries and continuing the bonfired traditions of their culture in a more financially viable way are often imprinting their social, religious, and personal. Contemporary earthenware pots produced with multiple buyers in mind, from global collectors to local families, are not “empty vessels.”