Many historical African art objects are some form of sculpted or molded pieces since historic Africans made art primarily for functional and utilitarian purposes and not necessarily for aesthetics. Also, since traditional African art was largely tied to religious and spiritual practices, the coveted African art objects in museums and collector’s possession are masks, statues, bronze works, ceramic art, and pottery. Perpetuating this widely admired artistry of the ancestors, contemporary African pottery takes the articulation of form that characterizes traditional African pottery as a vessel of utility and blends that with the refined finesse of contemporary art.

The products of this new age ceramic art are pots and vases and other vessels which serve decorative and other aesthetic purposes and are useful more for the contemplation of their artistic composition than for their utility. However, refinement of technique apart, one cannot remove contemporary African pottery from their traditional ancestry and the persistence of centuries of production, experimentation, and refinement that accumulated into the unique structural form and expressiveness of modern-day ceramic craft.

Historically, the masters of African pottery, and by extension ceramic art, have primarily been women. And this gendered expertise has survived into contemporary times as women still dominate the art of contemporary African pottery. The traditional production of ceramics in the vast area south of the Sahara historically has involved the use of hand-modeled clay without the use of a potter’s wheel. Basically, ceramics are modeled using three techniques: modeling from a single piece of clay, modeling based on the coil method, that is, spiral clay piling, and modeling clay using a readymade mold.

Across the continent, the process of pottery is as much a science as it is art. The potter hand builds the vessels, colors their surfaces with slips or other concoctions prepared from clay or vegetable sources, incises or impresses decorations with wood or metal tools, and fires the vessels at low temperatures, with the rich earthen bodies often decorated and sometimes burnished. For contemporary African potters, these technical processes are tightly controlled with traditional coiling techniques, use of industrial processes, including the potter’s wheel, and a series of oxidized and low-oxidized firing atmospheres to achieve different effects.

One of the masters of contemporary African pottery is Kenyan ceramic sculptor Magdalene Odundo whose vessels are characterized by their own fluid appearance, appearing to have slipped and slid. Her work reflects a unique insight into the transcultural roles a pot can play and the dual secular and sacred meaning that a vessel can hold. Her works also heavily reference the female body as a signifier of the creativity and expertise of the African woman as the progenitor of pottery.

Ladi Kwali, the renowned Nigerian potter, is also an influential figure in the progression of contemporary African pottery. Kwali’s works are made from coils of clay, beaten from the inside with a flat wooden paddle, and decorated with incised geometric and stylized figurative patterns, mostly drawings of reptiles and birds. She impressed patterns on top of the figures by rolling small roulettes of twisted string or notched wood over the surface of the clay, sometimes as horizontal banding and sometimes in vertical panels. In 1954, Ladi Kwali joined the Abuja Pottery (now known as the Ladi Kwali Pottery), which was then known as Pottery Training Centre in Suleja, as its first female potter. The center had been established in 1951 by the colonial Nigerian government after Michael Cardew, the Pottery Officer in the Department of Commerce and Industry, was marveled at Kwali’s pottery creations he had seen when he visited the palace of the Emir of Abuja.

At the center, Kwali’s creations represented a hybrid of traditional and western studio pottery. She adapted the traditional incised designs by inlaying them with a white kaolin and feldspar slip, which would gravitate into the depressed decorations, after which the pots were fired with a translucent celadon glaze so the areas with slip appeared pale green in contrast with the dark green or iron red stoneware body of the vessels. They were then glazed and fired in a high-temperature kiln. Kwali’s creations are highly revered and were featured in international exhibitions of Abuja pottery organized by Cardew, she gave demonstrations at the Royal College, Farnham, and Wenford Bridge in the UK, and in France and Germany in 1961. Her works were also exhibited at the Berkeley Galleries and in 1972, she toured America with Cardew.

Zizipho Poswa, a South African ceramic artist, is also a notable pioneer of contemporary African pottery. Her creations feature an exuberant use of color, texture, and form which manifests cultural Xhosa practices with contrasting modern ideas. Her ceramic art collection 'Ukuklula' - a personal narrative consisting of pieces documenting her transition from rural to the city has been acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Other pottery collections by Poswa include ‘Umthwalo', which represents women carrying heavy stacks of wood, parcels, or water on their heads; 'Magodi', a Shona term for traditional African hairstyles, the collection celebrates womanhood and the strong women she grew up with; and 'iLobola' which takes a closer look at her culture and explores the customary practice of paying lobola as a bride price.

A rising contemporary African pottery artist is Nigerian sculptor Ato Arinze whose clay piece ‘vessel with undulating form’, which was done in 2017, is available for sale on Aworanka.