Craft Around the Country

Princeton University Art Museum Shows Off Its Reenvisioned Curatorial Approach with a New Exhibition

As institutions across the country reimagine the museumgoing experience, Clay Has Memory: Creative Lineages from Africa demonstrates the potential of the model.

By Kate Schuler
July 20, 2026

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Ceramics

Museums & Galleries

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Photo by Richard Barnes, courtesy of the Princeton University Art Museum

A densely packed display case at Princeton University Art Museum, 2025. The museum, like others across the country, is reimagining how it displays artwork.

Tendrils burst from the ragged edges of a small opening at the top of Omen, an egg-shaped pot by Ghanaian artist El Anatsui. Part of his Broken Pots series from the 1970s—the title references the tradition of using shards of clay vessels in offerings to ancestors—the unglazed clay and manganese piece creates a disquieting balance of destruction and new life.

In the newly opened exhibition Clay Has Memory: Creative Lineages from Africa, running through July 3, 2027, at the new Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey, Omen sits next to the seed-like Deformed Forever, by Anatsui’s student Ozioma Onuzulike. A sharp horizontal slash scars the organic clay form, calling attention to the impact of colonialism and the extraction of the natural resources in Onuzulike’s native Nigeria. Together, the two vessels draw attention to the artists’ shared formal language and their exploration of clay as both material and metaphor.

The pairing exemplifies a major theme of the exhibition: the way artists of Africa and its diasporas share ceramic techniques and traditions across generations and geography, while leaving room for artistic and metaphorical expression.

Photo by Joseph Hu

Detail of Ozioma Onuzulike's Agbada ("1500 Brand"), a 2022 garment made from natural palm kernel shells, high-fired earthenware and stoneware clays, iron oxide, ash glazes, recycled glass, and copper wire, 129 x 131 x 4.75 in.

“African art history has been haunted by the idea of tradition as something that is timeless and stagnant and from the past,” says Perrin Lathrop, curator of African art at the Princeton University Art Museum. She curated Clay Has Memory, which features 45 vessels and sculptures by 35 artists from Africa and its diasporas.

Lathrop sees the exhibition as a way to redefine that concept of tradition, emphasizing how historical practices have always relied on innovation and evolution to remain relevant and meaningful over time. To that end, Clay Has Memory places contemporary work in proximity to ceramic pieces from unrecorded makers over centuries of African craft history, showing throughlines and departures in the ceramic practices of artists from Africa and the diaspora.

In this way, the exhibition mirrors the museum’s reenvisioned curatorial approach to its entire collection, which collapses traditional hierarchies of geography and chronology. The architecture of the new museum, which opened last October, allows the majority of its collection to be displayed on a single level in a series of interlocking pavilions.

“The design of the building encourages discovery,” says James Steward, the museum’s director. “You have no choice but to encounter a number of things you might not have gone looking for.”

Photo by Joseph Hu

Black Brazilian artist Lídia Lisbôa made Untitled, 2022, from coiled terracotta for her Cupinzeiros (Termite Mound) series.

The ground-floor gallery, where Clay Has Memory is displayed, sits next to the museum’s entrance and has windows on three sides that make it visible from the outside. It is, in many ways, intended to be a calling card for the larger museum. If drawn in by the striking ceramic forms, visitors are introduced to an interconnected, non-hierarchical way of looking at art— what Steward refers to as a “recombinant” approach—before they even ascend to the primary collections.

The museum’s curators are encouraged to use space in the galleries to create what Steward calls “surprising juxtapositions.” For example, an Andy Warhol painting of Marilyn Monroe is placed between two early European Renaissance depictions of the Virgin Mary. “It draws attention to the way in which she too was functioning as a kind of icon,” Steward says. Since the displays are intended to be dynamic and flexible, he adds that the portrait will at some point return to a gallery with modern art, where it may be read differently by visitors.

While Princeton’s approach with the new museum redesign would be difficult to replicate by smaller or less encyclopedic institutions, the reexamination of the museumgoing experience reflects questions many museum directors are asking as they think about their spaces and audiences.

Photo by Richard Barnes, courtesy of the Princeton University Art Museum

Princeton University Art Museum has reenvisioned its curatorial approach, collapsing traditional hierarchies of geography and chronology when displaying art. The architecture of the new museum, which opened last October, allows the majority of its collection to be displayed on a single level in a series of interlocking pavilions.

“The design of the building encourages discovery. You have no choice but to encounter a number of things you might not have gone looking for.”

— James Steward

At the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, curators have been experimenting by displaying materials that reveal the trial-and-error nature of the artistic process, showing evolution through preliminary drawings, sketches, and maquettes. The Walters also frequently organizes exhibitions around themes related to materials or concepts, instead of geography or chronology. Ohio’s Toledo Museum of Art is currently reinstalling their collection to collapse geographical divisions but keep chronology at the forefront, tracing concurrent developments and influences across continents while moving through historical eras.

Steward notes one important question Princeton had to consider during their reopening was the balance between providing explanation and guidance to visitors and creating space for audiences to make connections and find their own meaning in the art.

Clay Has Memory explores not only the forms and material innovations used by the ceramic artists, but the way clay objects serve as memorials, monuments, and vessels of knowledge.

Using Nigerian and Cameroonian coil-building techniques to create sculptural vessels, Philadelphia-based artist Adebunmi Gbadebo works with clay that she excavates from burial sites on the former plantation where her ancestors were enslaved in South Carolina.

Photo courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery

Simone Leigh, Dunham, 2023, bronze, 64 x 47 x 41 in.

“Clay is a medium that materializes the history of land and place and can be a repository of memory,” says Lathrop. “That land, that history is so key to the way she then thinks about her sculptures that she makes as memorials, both to her ancestors and to the histories and lives that they lived.”

While using pit-firing and raku to fire her work, Gbadebo incorporates other natural elements such as hair and rice to create distinct surfaces. Her piece, William Ravenell, is one of the museum’s 12 new ceramic acquisitions on display in the exhibition.

“There’s such thoughtfulness in the conjoining of these objects in a space where you can both visually isolate them or see them in each other’s company—there’s something beautiful and powerful in that,” says Steward. “If someone is willing to stop for a couple of minutes and be in the gallery, I defy them to leave unmoved by the human condition of what’s represented.”

Photo by Joseph Hu

Adebunmi Gbadebo, William Ravenell, 2025, pit-fired soil from True Blue Plantation (Fort Motte, South Carolina), shoe polish, Carolina Gold rice, 15 x 20 x 14 in.

Kate Schuler is a potter, writer, and editor based in Washington, DC.

Learn more about Clay Has Memory online.

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This article was made possible with support from the Windgate Foundation.

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