🎧 Bridging Traditions: Frederick Ebenezer Okaiand the Contemporary Ceramics Revolution in Ghana

Appears in the December 2024 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

Note on terminology. This article uses the terms Indigenous potters, village potters, and traditional potters interchangeably, in keeping with Ghanaian vernacular. These designators are to distinguish potters working outside of academic or institutional settings but should not imply anachronism in any sense. Rather, these are contemporary artists working in the context of matrilineal praxis.  

Over the past decade, there has been an unprecedented, quiet revolution happening within US and international ceramics. One need look no further than recent exhibitions, lectures, and conferences to appreciate the presence and impact that a new generation of Ghanaian artists are having on the field of contemporary ceramics. This phenomenon includes visiting faculty from Ghanaian institutions and MFA students at a plethora of US universities, many of whom have remained in the States after completing their graduate degrees in teaching positions, residencies, and more. These artists have in common an association with Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), the premier academic art institution in Ghana.

An important artist who stands both among and distinct from peers who have come to the US for graduate study is Frederick Ebenezer Okai. Okai completed his BFA and MFA at KNUST and is currently a PhD candidate. Okai was a senior peer and early mentor for some of the young artists who eventually moved to the US for graduate study and is now receiving much-deserved recognition in the international ceramics field. Okai’s work constitutes a dynamic bridge between Ghanaian Indigenous ceramics and immanently contemporary approaches to artmaking, and his complex practice includes fieldwork (he refers to himself as a pseudo-ethnographer), research, and a deep engagement with philosophy. His record includes exhibitions and residencies in Ghana, Europe, and the US, including an ambitious site-specific, multi-material and media installation held in rural Ghana. Interviews for this article were conducted during Okai’s visiting artist residency at the University of Arkansas in the spring of 2024.

Early Inspiration

Okai’s earliest memory of clay was when he and a group of fellow children were searching for cast-off materials with which to build toy trucks and they happened upon a natural clay source, which are prevalent in Ghana. Okai built a television as his first clay endeavor, which proved to be prescient as his current work intermingles ceramics and technology. Okai’s mother was an important inspiration, as he watched and sometimes assisted her work in mosaics and textiles as part of her own education. This early drive to work with his hands eventually developed into an interest in architecture, but when Fred embarked upon his undergraduate studies, he ultimately opted for visual arts. After an initial commitment to textiles, Okai ultimately settled into ceramics where he found he could utilize his architectural interests. 

It is an indication of the intensity of Okai’s prolific practice that he remembers a period during his BFA studies when he spent three weeks in the studio without returning to his apartment. He would fill entire sketchbooks with ideas for a single assignment, and classmates would beg him not to make more than five pieces for an assignment requiring one. The momentum of his practice led Okai to pursue an MFA immediately following his BFA. Currently, Okai is a PhD candidate in the department of painting and sculpture at KNUST and is a member of the widely lauded blaxTARLINES artist collective, an association of contemporary Ghanaian artists, most of whom are KNUST painting and sculpture alums, who maintain highly active international practices.

Indigenous Pottery Practices 

In Ghana, Indigenous ceramics has historically been the nearly exclusive province of women makers. Ironically, academic ceramics has been a male-dominated space. As his practice has evolved, Okai has come to occupy a unique position in relation to Indigenous women potters. Inspired by the encouragement of a professor, he began to visit potters working in villages throughout Ghana. Though Okai was initially inclined to dismiss traditional pottery as unrelated to his contemporary practice, his professor tasked him to resist prejudging, to closely pay attention, to watch and listen, and assured him that he would begin to see and appreciate facets of practice that were previously hidden. Following initial visits, Okai was still having difficulty making conceptual or technical connections between his practice and those of Indigenous potters. It was the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in particular his magnum opus Difference and Repetition, which proved to be the connecting filament that allowed Okai to position his work and thinking in relation to that of Indigenous Ghanaian potters. Whereas previously Okai had viewed the work of Indigenous potters as rote, through direct experience with communities of potters and a Deleuzian lens, he began to appreciate the discrete uniqueness that is intrinsic to reproduction, and the subtle ways self-aware potters were able to inject individuality, and literally personal signatures, into work that under a superficial viewing might seem indistinguishable. Through Deleuze, an understanding developed regarding the significance of time as relating to production; even works that are intended to be identical are in fact differentiated by the specific time of their making. Additionally, Okai had the epiphany that the ceramics process itself is a preventative against dull repetition, always producing unique, idiosyncratic results.

During his visits with traditional potters another epiphany came when he began to see village potters making forms closely related to those “original” works he was making at the university. For Okai, this drove home the notion that, rather than a vestige of the past, village potters throughout Ghana are as much contemporary artists as any other. 

Through his fieldwork, Okai learned that while the general traditional taboo against men making pots was nearly always acknowledged, in some communities there were also limited conditions under which men were sanctioned to make pottery. He is familiar with at least one village in northern Ghana in which men are allowed to make pottery as a normal practice. In his continuing fieldwork, Okai intends to further interrogate the gendered aspects of pottery making in Ghana. 

Deep experiences with Indigenous potters have been profound for Okai, and the first manifestation of this influence was a show entitled “Light Soup,” held in 2021 at KNUST. The title is a reference to one of Ghana’s beloved dishes, literally a light soup that is customarily cooked with a variety of proteins and served with an accompanying starch, usually fufu or banku. The exhibition’s reference is twofold. Firstly, Okai served a communal meal of light soup during the exhibition’s opening reception, exemplifying his commitment to community engagement and social practice. Metaphorically, the exhibition highlighted the sense in which Indigenous potters, by providing utensils for food preparation and by their custodianship of ancestral practices, are feeding the soul as well as the body. 

Immersion, Collaboration, and Conversation

The Light Soup exhibition constituted the first instance of a ceramics exhibition from the blaxTARLINES collective, which was previously dominated by found-material sculpture and painting. This was a significant breakthrough as Okai had experienced some skepticism from peers and faculty regarding the validity of clay in contemporary practice. For Light Soup, Okai ambitiously constructed an immersive space using brick and mortar, reproducing the interior of a Ghanian-style domed kiln. This exhibition marked Okai’s first inclusion of pottery made by his women-potter mentors as well as his own in a common space, not siloed or removed, but in dynamic conversation. Though not without conceptual challenges, this was, and remains, a revolutionary challenge to the false divides between “traditional” and “contemporary” art, and the singular artist vs. a collective. Okai collected pottery from many districts in Ghana and along with his own studio work he broke the original pots and reconstructed new vessels from the disparate shards, purposefully blurring distinctions between makers and regional styles. Pots filled the space, including wall-mounted pieces and pots hanging from the ceiling. Some were lit from within giving the sense of an interior fire, which, for Okai, represented the soul of the piece. The space also included projected video and sound recorded during fieldwork. In this way village potters were present and acknowledged in the space. 

Light Soup was quickly followed up by an exhibition of unprecedented scope and scale. “Earthly Structures and Contingent Breakthroughs” was presented in 2022 at the Gyamadudu Museum, Kwabre-Heman, Ghana. In the inaugural exhibition of the new facility consisting of nine interconnected domes, viewers were led through space after space, each offering a distinct immersive experience. Themes from Light Soup were expanded upon, including collaboration with Indigenous potters, and the scale of individual works was exponentially increased. One of the nine domes included a VR station that allowed viewers to experience the space both physically and with virtual expansion.

Regarding both Light Soup and Earthly Structures, Okai acknowledges concern for the representation and accreditation of his collaborators, citing problematic precedents such as the (in)famous exhibition “Magiciens de la Terre (Magicians of the Earth),” presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande Halle de la Villette in 1989, that while intended to remedy issues of representation and exoticization in contemporary art, in retrospect did not succeed according to contemporary standards. For Earthly Structures, Okai produced a publication featuring profiles of his teacher-collaborators from village potteries and included audio and video of conversations played and projected in various spaces. Importantly, Okai made the decision not to unilaterally provide language interpretation, but rather retained local languages in certain instances and in other cases the voice of a translator. It should also be noted that the exhibition space, the Gyamadudu Museum is located far from urban centers, in a rural area. This presented a challenge for urban viewers to attend, conversely made participation and viewing from rural audiences much easier and is aligned with Okai’s conceptual priorities. 

Frederick Ebenezer Okai’s work is singular in terms of complexity, basis in fieldwork and theory, position in relation to Indigenous makers and contemporary praxis, social practice, and the vitality to engage audiences both in Ghana and abroad. 

the author Adam Posnak is studio potter and instructor of ceramics and foundations at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He began traveling to Ghana in 2016 and spent the 2018–19 academic year in Ghana with his family. He continues to travel to Ghana regularly, studying and documenting pottery associated with religious practice.