Black Earth: Vessels Across the Atlantic centers the work of Black and African women in ceramics by performing exhibition case studies in three European-based art institutions and how these artists articulated their relationship and expression of the Black body within ownership. My hypothesis is, can Black feminist literature be the proper narrative tool to engage with ceramic vessels to bring further recognition to the field of ceramics and the community of Black female ceramicists practicing traditional techniques and methods?

• Does Black feminist literature change the storytelling of these works?

Substituting the vessel for the body on the pedestal inserts narratives owned by a marginalized voice that is deserving of a platform in Western contexts as a blueprint of storytelling interwoven with culture; this is what I argue contributes to the diasporic archive and the contextual understanding to critically think through how race has informed the way we engage through generations and community. Communities entered by artists in this thesis describe standard techniques, skills, and ceramics processes rooted in Indigenous and African practices spread through enslavement and culture exchange. Practitioners, artists, and educators preserve them.

 Furthermore, through material culture, how do Black female artists create substitutions for the black body, and can it ever be equal in valuation? The argument for Black feminist readings is to challenge defaulted language regarding gender and race in Western art, exemplified in legitimizing Abuja pottery after the British introduction of the Abuja Pottery School in Nigeria. This is also in conjunction with the commodity of Black women’s labor in visual art and historically through property ownership- breaking from centralizing Western narratives and developing a vocabulary of relationships to the earth, the body, space, fertility, and self-determination. Finally, Black feminism adds context to understanding the vessels’ material culture and visual arts contributions through labor. Magdalene Odundo, a Nigerian-born- British artist, works in hand-building as in West African and Indigenous Pueblo pottery tradition, yet minimalist as her studies under Japanese sculpture and technique and further acknowledgment of other cultures’ use and techniques with clay; the hybridity of her work opens the conversation for how her work should be categorized in collections and the lack of a mandated standard that is updated within internal institution communities.

Black feminism causes us to challenge what we know about reading vessels and use the body to orient the viewer to the art object. It is also deeply confrontational to how collecting institutions have prioritized this type of work and how ‘taste’ has changed the relevancy of ceramics in the art world.