Baganda to Zulu
Baganda to Zulu:
Fired brilliance of ceramic vessels in Africa.
Pottery is amongst the oldest arts known to man. It has been documented in Kenya since the Upper Paleolithic era and has been dated to the 8th millennium B.C. in Saharan sites. Clay is one of the first materials used by men and women to create objects for daily use and for rituals, transforming it into works of art using diverse and ingenuous techniques.
The impulse for this small-scale project was my discovery, thanks to the keen eye of Alan Marcuson, of a small group of beautifully modeled black, highly burnished royal vessels made for the Baganda King of Uganda. I then decided to curate a small exhibition of clay vessels ranging chronologically from pre-dynastic Egypt and the medieval Soninke Ghana Empire in northern Mali, to the magnificent Zulu beer vessels from South Africa. I also included some unusual and rare vessels from the Democratic Republic of the Congo which stand out for the subtlety of their surfaces.
