Black Clay: Black Women, Ceramics and Contemporary Art offers a critical history of Black women’s contributions to ceramics and working with clay, spanning North America, Latin America, the Caribbean, the African continent and their diasporas. Grounded in Black feminist theory, postcolonial critique and contemporary art criticism, the book also recovers histories that have often been overlooked or framed primarily through ethnographic and anthropological approaches.

Across four chapters, it traces Indigenous matrilineal traditions through modernist interventions to contemporary practice. It considers clay not as an inert material but as a living archive that holds memory and connects generations of Black women artists.

Black Clay is set for release with Yale University Press, London and New Haven, in October 2027

Image: multiple black and images of Ladi Kwali. Courtesy of Woolley & Wallis .