“Even as ... Africanist art historians have recuperated genres associated with craft, gaps in scholarship that have resulted from the discipline’s early neglect of craft practices during the mid-twentieth century merit attention. Gwari potting, the products of Michael Cardew’s pottery at Abuja, and Ladi Kwali’s ceramics are among the topics that ... have been overlooked at this juncture in the discipline’s history, and their absence from scholarship has not been corrected for in the time since, even as Ladi Kwali has risen to the status of a national icon in Nigeria."

"Her decorated stoneware pots diverged considerably from their earthenware archetypes. ... The new pots were glazed and kiln-fired at high temperatures rather than cured in far shorter fires outdoors. At between thirty and forty centimeters in height, they were smaller than the typical earthenware randa, which had a capacity of twenty to thirty gallons, and they were flat- rather than round-bottomed, as was characteristic of Gwari vessels. Moreover, they lost their functionality: while their earthenware counterparts were lightweight, could cool their liquid contents through evaporation, and could be cooked with over an open fire without shattering, the glazed stoneware pots had no such utility. Their new material and context of production meant they had become too heavy and expensive to be used casually in the domestic context. In other ways, Ladi Kwali’s stoneware translations amplified characteristics associated with Gwari ceramics. Gwarin Yamma potters often filled the incised decorations on the surface of a pot with a white resist - white clay, corn flour, or wood ash - before splashing the pots post-firing with a dark tincture made from locust bean pods called makuba. This effect of tonal contrast was mimicked and made more lasting in Ladi Kwali’s Abuja pots: after bisque firing, and before glazing, her sgraffito-decorated pots were covered with a white slip that sank into incisions, resulting after firing in an inlaid effect. In this fashion, the designs Ladi Kwali etched into her pots became particularly prominent, and these designs - schematic, cross-hatched zoomorphic forms; roulette patterns; incised bands - were a combination of motifs and forms characteristic of Gwari pottery decoration."

"Would Ladi Kwali have been a more appealing subject of art historical inquiry had her field of production been limited to the village of Kwali, absent colonial meddling and the jaunts abroad that led her colleagues to nickname her 'Radio London,' and had her pots broken less radically with the potting practices of her community? Might her form of pottery have been regarded as too Westernized and too divorced from Gwari tradition to appeal to Western researchers, whose fieldwork in the early years of African art history was driven by a sense that traditional art forms were on the decline and must be documented before they disappeared entirely?"

“The preeminence of Zaria and its Nsukka offshoot in scholarship on twentieth-century Nigerian art has effectively flattened what was in reality a polyphonic and often contradictory artistic landscape, populated by artists who emerged from and worked within diverse social contexts, with divergent ambitions and modi operandi. There never was a singular, monolithic colonial encounter provoking a singular, unified response, only encounters in the plural feeding a plurality of artistic outcomes."

“Designations of [Kwali’s] practice as emblematic of the traditional or the modern falter when brought into the art historical context - she is too touched by forces of modernity to emblemize the traditional and not modern enough (or rather, not the right kind of modern) to be on equal footing with the artists associated with Nigerian modernism. Time is largely at issue here, in two senses: the overlap of her career with the colonial and postcolonial eras has complicated her historicization, so, too, has how the span of her practice aligned with shifting priorities and approaches in the discipline of African art history.”

"If the Nigerian modernism encapsulated by the Zaria artists, in its metabolization of European modernist art strategies for the purpose of inventing a new African art, exemplified ... one form of cultural adaptation and translation resulting from modernity’s proliferation of intercultural contact zones ... then surely a case can be made for other modernisms of hybrid birth in twentieth-century Nigeria, which was rife with frictional contact brought about by the ... meeting of varied cultural practices of diverse origin. It is high time to widen the scope of African modernism — ideally in a way that invites rigorous analysis of the work of female artists, and of artists not associated with elite academic institutions — and to think in terms of Nigerian modernisms rather than a singular national modernism."