Princeton University Art Museum Announces Clay Has Memory: Creative Lineages from Africa
New exhibition brings together artists across generations to explore clay as a medium of memory and knowledge transmission
PRINCETON, NJ, June 16, 2026- The Princeton University Art Museum will present Clay Has Memory: Creative Lineages from Africa, an exhibition that examines the ways in which artists from Africa and its diasporas use clay to sustain the legacies of their creative predecessors. Celebrating an area of dramatic growth in the Museum’s holdings and drawing on themes very much at large in today’s global art scene, it debuts to the public in the Museum’s first-floor David Nasher Haemisegger Gallery with a Members Preview on July 18, 2026, before opening to the public on July 19, 2026, and remaining on view through July 3, 2027.
Clay Has Memory: Creative Lineages from Africa brings together works by 35 artists working across historical, modern, and contemporary contexts. Featuring 45 vessels and sculptures, the exhibition highlights how these forms transmit memory and meaning from one generation to the next, through the techniques and processes used to create them as well as through the clay itself. The exhibition features powerful and awe-inspiring objects by historical artists, their names often unrecorded; generations of artists creating within the same family; and some of the most celebrated modern and contemporary practitioners. The presentation centers the contributions of women across geographies and generations, including artists whose work has historically received limited visibility in museum contexts.
“This exhibition continues our ongoing interrogation of ceramics as an art form that has for too long been marginalized, not least because of its frequent association with women makers. Together these spectacular objects offer a fascinating examination of the medium and bring a compelling focus to makers from Africa and its diasporas,” said James Steward, the Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director of the Princeton University Art Museum. “It’s an area in which we’ve made a deep investment in building our collections, without which this exhibition would not have been possible.”
"It is important for teaching museums such as ours to present exhibitions of this kind,” said Perrin Lathrop, exhibition curator and the Museum’s curator of African art. “Clay Has Memory will trouble the boundaries between art and craft and invite inquiry into the hierarchies that have historically relegated the creative labor of ceramic artists, especially women, to the realm of the anonymous and the undervalued. This will be an opportunity for visitors and scholars alike to understand the manipulation of clay as a repository and metaphor for generational knowledge.”
The exhibition considers how artists sustain inherited knowledge from Africa through their commitment to clay as a medium and is organized around four themes. Raw Material demonstrates how clay can carry histories of place and identity. For example, Adebunmi Gbadebo creates vessels from soil connected to the lives of her enslaved ancestors, while Theaster Gates incorporates salvaged and repurposed urban building materials into memorials that honor the laborers who originally used them. Together, these sculptures embed memory within material form. In Genealogies of Labor making becomes a site of knowledge transmission, as techniques move between teachers, students, families, and communities, historically through matrilineal lines. This is seen in the work of Magdelene Odundo, who apprenticed with the celebrated ceramic artist Ladi Dosei Kwali in northern Nigeria, and in the Nala family of South Africa, whose multigenerational practice is rooted in Zulu hand-coiled and burnished vessels. Memorial brings together works from across centuries that commemorate individuals with clay, including sculptures by Etiyé Dimma Poulsen and Demas Nwoko that respond to the presence of historical objects from Africa in museum collections. In Monument artists such as Zizipho Poswa, Kwabena Ampofo-Anti, and Leilah Babirye create large-scale clay sculptures that address histories marked by the legacies of colonialism.
These themes highlight a network of artists who share knowledge through collaboration, teaching, and exchange. Many of the artists engage with each other’s work through workshops, publications, and shared studio practices, forming an active community that connects both local and global contexts. The exhibition makes these relationships visible while creating new opportunities for dialogue across objects and between objects and viewers.
Clay Has Memory: Creative Lineages from Africa is curated by Perrin Lathrop, curator of African art at the Princeton University Art Museum. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication featuring new research by Lathrop, along with essays by the art historians Elizabeth Perrill, PhD, and Jareh Das, PhD, that elaborate on the artistic lineages presented in the exhibition. Public programs will engage audiences with the exhibition’s themes and include scholarly lectures, family artmaking opportunities, and hands-on workshops with exhibiting artists such as Adebunmi Gbadebo and Leilah Babirye. Visit the Museum’s website for more information.
Exhibition Credits
Clay Has Memory: Creative Lineages from Africa is made possible by leadership support from The Terra Foundation for American Art and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support is provided by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation; the Kathleen C. Sherrerd Program Fund for American Art; the Melanie and John Clarke Exhibition Fund; the Princeton University Humanities Council’s David A. Gardner ‘69 Magic Project; Princeton University’s Africa World Initiative, Department of African American Studies, and Graduate School—Access, Diversity and Inclusion; the Virginia and Bagley Wright, Class of 1946, Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art; and the many generous contributors to the Director’s Exhibition Fund.
The accompanying publication is generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fund and the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University.
About the Princeton University Art Museum
With a collecting history that extends back to 1755, the Princeton University Art Museum is one of the leading university art museums in the country, featuring collections that have grown to include more than 117,000 works of art ranging from ancient to contemporary art and spanning the globe. Committed to advancing Princeton’s teaching and research missions, the Art Museum also serves as an entry point to the University for visitors from around the world.
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