High Museum’s African art celebrates women’s craft

The High Museum of Art has reopened its African art galleries with a new installation centered on women’s ceramic traditions, a medium that curator Lauren Tate Baeza describes as both physically intimate and historically overlooked within museum collections.

The gallery, which previously focused on masquerade arts, now elevates ceramics in a permanent rotation that acknowledges the centuries-old labor, knowledge, and cultural continuity embedded in clay-based practices across Africa.

Baeza, the Fred and Rita Richman Curator of African Art, said the shift reflects both a curatorial responsibility and an opportunity to expand how the museum presents Africa’s creative histories. “I think it is important for galleries to not be static,” she said. “It is changing because I am a new curator here.” She noted that the previous curator held the role for nearly nineteen years, leaving her with a broad foundation and a large collection to reintroduce to the public in new ways.

Ceramics, she said, offered a rare chance to highlight both geographic diversity and women’s craftsmanship. “We had Eastern, Southern, Northern, and Sahelian works,” Baeza explained. “We had all this diversity of making across the vastness that is Africa.” She added that the museum’s ceramic holdings include antiquities in addition to traditional and modern works, creating a timeline not seen in other parts of the collection.

The installation places strong emphasis on women’s embodied labor. “These works are imbued with the labor physically, with the sweat and the fingerprints and the breath of the women that work on them,” Baeza said during a tour of the gallery. She described the process of creating vessels as “a laborious choreography of co-creation,” reflecting the ways women have shaped clay into functional and ceremonial forms for generations.

This focus also responds to gaps uncovered during institutional research. Baeza explained that while working with students and fellows to study artist guilds, nearly all the documented traditions centered men. “We just kept coming up against men’s artist guilds over and over and over again,” she said. Ceramics offered a corrective approach. “This was an opportunity for us to celebrate women’s craft tradition,” she said.

Since joining the museum in 2020, Baeza has expanded the ceramics collection with multiple works now on display. One of the most recent acquisitions arrived in April after years of study, with the addition of Ngozi-Omeje Zema’s ceramic work, Togetherness, 2022.  “We had been looking at it for years,” she said. “The board voted to acquire it in April, and she assembled it in September.”

The installation also highlights contemporary artists whose work draws from traditional techniques, including Zema, who spent a full week at the High creating the largest sculpture in her Boundless Vessels series.

The reinstallation is the first phase of a broader transformation of the African galleries. Baeza revealed that the museum is planning a dedicated space for Nigerian visual culture, tentatively set for 2026. “This is a really great opportunity for us to serve those aspects of our community,” she said, noting Atlanta’s large Nigerian population. “African history is world history, and giving people the opportunity to learn and expand beyond what they immediately know is something that museums should obligate themselves to do.”

Baeza said she hopes visitors return often as new rotations unfold. “This is the first step of two,” she said. “We will be further realizing a new orientation for the African galleries.”

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