In Krannert Art Museum's ongoing effort to highlight rarely seen works from the collection, Spheres of Influence features a selection of 24 ceramic pots from regions across Africa.

Visually compelling for their robust yet elegant forms and beautifully restrained surface designs, these vessels are also highly social objects. Used for storing grains or personal possessions, cooking, brewing beer, containing and cooling water, housing spirits or medicinal substances, or as communicative devices and markers of prestige, pots perform critical roles in the everyday, ceremonial, and political lives of their communities.

Made predominantly by women artists with deep knowledge of local materials, molding and firing techniques, and the logics of design and efficient form, pots also embody a politics of gender. Women’s close identification with their vessels and control over the process of their production attest to the power of women’s creative labor and their ability to transform earth into containers of enduring meaning, value, and sociality.

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