Her pottery’s forms and stylistic motifs were derived from Gbari culture and shared among women of her ethnic group (fig. 1). Kwali would go on to make hundreds of waterpots and other thrown wares featuring varied geometric and figurative designs inspired by nature, including animals and plants. This was a way for the artist to intentionally incorporate the Gbari design vernacular in earthenware and stoneware as she developed as a potter. The distinctive blend of traditional Indigenous Gbari pottery and British studio pottery represents Ladi Kwali’s shift from a local ceramist to an international one. This transition—influenced by cultural exchanges occurring in Nigeria when the country was still under British colonial rule—tainted the project with uneven power dynamics that, though problematic, shaped and defined Ladi Kwali’s global acclaim.

In a photograph of Ladi Kwali taken during a pottery demonstration in England in the 1970s by William Alfred Ismay (W. A. Ismay), the most active collector of British studio pottery at the time, Ladi Kwali is elegantly dressed in a pale blue polo shirt, brown patterned wrapper, earrings, and a brown silk head tie (fig. 2). Captured deep in concentration, she is shown incising a waterpot. Kwali was known for her fashion sense, a blend of traditional and Western styles of dress, mainly via the many demonstrations she carried out while touring Europe and the United States in 1962 and 1972, respectively.⁴ Kwali’s choice in clothing belies the physicality of her work, which required that she thrust her fist into a giant ball of clay and then, while circling it, stretch up what would become the wall of the pot with a scraper. She would go on to build the upper half with thick coils, paddle the whole vessel into shape, smooth and decorate it with roller patterns, and finally, incise it with Gbari figures of different creatures.

At the time of this photo, Kwali was in her late forties and had honed her craft in the Gbari tradition of hand-built pottery. Having demonstrated remarkable mastery, she had gained not only national acclaim but also international recognition for her work.⁵ Her precision and steady hand in using sharp blade-like tools to inscribe the clay resulted in the distinct lines visible on the vessel’s surface. In an interview, British Kenyan ceramist Magdalene A. N. Odundo (born 1950) reminisced about Kwali’s attention to detail, stating: “Oh boy, it was amazing. She would point out the mistakes I had made. It was her eye that had the ability to see, form, and correct it. She had a sense of geometry in her bones.” Odundo recounted that Ladi Kwali would “dance” around her pot as she raised and smoothed it, singing in pleasure at her success.⁶ Odundo had previously recalled meeting Kwali in 1974, when the younger potter began working at the Abuja Pottery Training Centre (now in Suleja). Odundo was introduced to Kwali by Michael Cardew (1901–1983), the center’s founder and a pioneer of the British studio pottery movement widely credited for reviving the slipware tradition in England, whom she had met while a student in Farnham that same year.⁷ This experience profoundly shaped her path and solidified her decision to pursue a career in pottery.

Ladi Kwali was heavily tattooed with symbols, and as Ismay’s photograph records, her name was prominently marked on her inner left arm, where the words “Akou Mista Dase, Ladi Kwali” are visible. In this iconic image, she firmly secures the pot by its rim with her left hand while making an incision down its wide belly with her right. Geometric horizontal bands are visible on the neck of the vessel. In his report titled Ladi Kwali: Nigeria’s Potter Extraordinary, which he prepared for the board of trustees of the Nigerian National Order of Merit, C. O. Adepegba proposes that Kwali’s tattoos are an extension of the decorative motifs that adorn Gbari pottery wares: “Since Ladi Kwali had tattoos of geometric figures on her body, it is easy to identify body markings among the Gbari as the only source of her geometric designs.”⁸ The report also cites observations made by historians Sarah Riddick and Clara Hieronymus that reference geometric-patterned tattoos, notably those on the backs of Gbari women and echoed in the designs on decorative pottery and, in varied form, on calabashes, wood carvings, and leatherwork in Kwali town and other parts of Nigeria. One could also speculate that Kwali’s tattoos and pottery designs reflect her deep engagement with folkloric and cultural symbolism and with the natural world and animals.

Kwali used the direct-pull method, which involves hand-building a waterpot directly from a lump of clay, to create pots like the one shown in Ismay’s photograph. This method enabled her to form a short, plump-bellied vessel with a narrow, flared-lip neck. To make taller vessels of different shapes, she used a makeshift rounded disk to create a small pot, which she then enlarged by adding clay coils. As she built up the body of the piece, she circled it clockwise and then counterclockwise, walking steadily backward while dragging one foot to maintain balance—a technique widely practiced by potters undertaking hand-building because it helps to prevent dizziness.

Ladi Kwali first encountered Michael Cardew in 1954, a few years after he arrived in Nigeria to take up his appointment as a senior potter officer employed by the Nigerian colonial government. Cardew researched Nigerian pottery traditions, touring the country and making extensive notes about methods, techniques, clay bodies, and mineral deposits for glazing. He chose a site in the Emirate of Abuja (now Suleja) for his Pottery Training Centre (PTC), a small-scale workshop intended to train boys and men to be potters by introducing them to modern techniques that would enable them to make wheel-thrown, glazed tableware (figs. 3, 4).

It is noteworthy that Cardew’s biographer, Tanya Harrod; scholar Lisa Bagley; and curator and scholar Susan Mullin Vogel have raised issues surrounding Cardew’s engagement in Nigeria. Bagley takes Cardew and his role to task, describing him as “at the intersection of Africa and the West in ceramics where he could act as a gatekeeper between African ceramists and Western audiences.”⁹ Vogel and Harrod remark on the distinct separation and lack of engagement between Cardew and academic art movements in Nigeria, notably that of the Zaria Art Society, which was active in the 1950s and 1960s. Its members, known as the Zaria Rebels, promoted “natural synthesis,” a concept conceived of and advocated by the group’s founder, Uche Okeke.¹⁰ Natural synthesis called for merging the best of Western and Nigerian traditions. However, in Vogel’s view, many of the artists associated with the Zaria viewed Abuja pottery as old-fashioned and ethnographic.¹¹ Harrod saw Cardew’s position as paradoxical—that of a modernist who disliked modernity and a colonial servant who despised the British Empire yet no doubt benefited from the privilege enabled by colonialism.¹²

Cardew first saw Ladi Kwali’s pots on a customary visit to the palace of the emir of Abuja, Alhaji Suleiman Barau, who had several of her pots in his personal collection.¹³ Though Cardew’s initial plan was for a male-only pottery enterprise, he reconsidered this take after encountering Kwali’s pottery. With the encouragement of the emir, he accepted Ladi Kwali as a trainee and the center’s first female potter in 1954.

At the time of its establishment in the 1950s and mainly through to the 1970s, the PTC gained a reputation in England and internationally due to Cardew’s influence as an established British studio potter. He organized exhibitions at the Berkeley Galleries in London in 1958, 1959, and 1962, which proved pivotal to the recognition of Kwali’s internationalism as Cardew’s connection and the interest garnered from his Abuja pottery project led the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) to acquire one of her waterpots and some of her thrown wares. The waterpot, the first work by Kwali to be institutionally collected, is on permanent display in the Timothy Sainsbury Gallery, which houses part of the V&A’s ceramics collection.

Kwali’s success opened the door to other Gbari women potters, including Halima Audu, who joined the PTC in 1960 (but tragically died the following year). Asibi Ido joined in 1962, followed by Kande Ushafa and Lami Toto, both of whom arrived a year later, in 1963, and were active at the center until around the late 1970s. These women continued the legacy of Kwali and Gbari hand-building after Ladi Kwali’s passing in 1984. The potters were accustomed to pit-fired pottery, but Cardew introduced them to wheel-thrown, high-temperature, kiln-fired and glazed stoneware, which previously was assigned only to male trainees. As Susan Mullin Vogel has noted, “Kiln firing was an exclusively male occupation, while open bonfire was practiced mainly by women and universally used in African traditions where it had a meager failure rate.” While the techniques used by women “have been characterized as technically simple,” Vogel points out that this method requires a hyper-refined combination of a specific clay body, fuel, and firing technique as well as certain atmospheric conditions—a formula derived from local experimentation mainly by generations of women, in other words, through regional and Indigenous know-how.¹⁴

Kwali created both hand-built vessels and thrown wares following Cardew’s method, but it was Cardew’s suggestion that she glaze her traditional Gbari-style waterpots with Chun or tenmoku high-temperature glazes (fig. 5), a finish never before used by Gbari potters.¹⁵ This hybridization transformed her pots from functional vessels to celebrated decorative art objects. As the scholar Emman Okunna observes: “This transition from tradition to modernity was a significant turning point in Ladi Kwali’s life and ceramic art practice. It marked an essential interface between the two domains in this iconic personality’s historical art experience. Ladi Kwali now saw herself in an entirely new domain, a testament to her adaptability and innovation.”¹⁶ Even so—and though she was the PTC’s star potter—Kwali earned less than her male counterparts, as educational qualifications determined wages, and she had received no formal education. This discrepancy reflected the wage structure imposed on the center by the Nigerian colonial government, which determined and enforced salary bands.¹⁷

Kwali’s adaptability, innovation, and agency, as Okunna observes, are evident in a portrait by Doig Simmons taken in 1959 (fig. 6). In Simmons’s black-and-white photograph, Ladi Kwali stands confidently in front of the main kiln, which can be seen at the center. She is dressed in a simple sleeveless sundress and her signature head tie. An unglazed terra-cotta waterpot sits at her feet, indicating that it is on its way to being glazed and then fired in the kiln behind her, a process that was, by then, her usual practice. We see a confident and aware maker standing proudly by her work, one of a series of waterpots adapted from Gbari pot-making tradition. Based on her working methods throughout her career, she clearly approached her “modern” stoneware ceramics not by sketching or inventing unique forms but rather through the creative processes she had learned in her village.

The portraits of Kwali discussed in this essay provide a lens for re-reading her agency as an astute, self-assured Gbari woman potter framed but not defined and contained by the colonial structure that brought about her international fame. As Marla C. Berns observes, although women are the primary producers of pottery in Africa, scholars have seldom attributed the creation of archaeologically recovered figurative ceramic sculptures to them. Moreover, the question of authorship regarding these esteemed ceramics has rarely been explored.¹⁸ It is crucial to consider Kwali’s identity as rooted in place and context and in who she was before and after her interactions with Cardew and his Abuja pottery project. In addressing the methodological challenges of confronting object histories, one must consider Kwali’s Gbari identity and agency, which are imbued in the objects she left behind. Additionally, Kwali’s pottery embodies a pivotal moment of transformation and hybridity, merging Indigenous Nigerian ceramic traditions with British studio pottery and modern Western techniques.

In 2007, Kwali and her pots were immortalized on the reverse side of the Nigerian 20-naira bank note. This national tribute goes to show how important the artist is in Nigeria. Yet, just the same, historical accounts of her artistic journey remain scarce in comparison to her stature. Little public information exists about Kwali’s later years, and no known recorded or printed interviews document her experiences in Suleja and beyond. Her presence within Nigerian Modernism remains paradoxical—both absent and present—primarily overlooked by intellectuals of the period, who were no doubt aware of her. Still, it is peculiar that she is not cited as an influence given the overlapping period. Kwali’s works resonate with concepts of natural synthesis put forward by members of the Zaria Art Society, calling for the merging of the best of Western and Nigerian traditions, forms, techniques, and artistic ideas into a hybrid art-making practice and conceptual framework. Ceramist and scholar Professor Ozioma Onuzulike has argued for recognition of Kwali and other workshop-trained Indigenous female potters who used natural synthesis to achieve works that have contributed to the discourse on African modernism.¹⁹ This marginalization was arguably shaped by Cardew’s deliberate detachment from the broader Nigerian artistic discourse and the fact that his pottery project upheld a colonial vision.

My recent trip to Kwali, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), and Suleja in northern Nigeria to speak to Kwali’s surviving family members raised more questions than answers about how she is remembered. Only a few photographs of the artist and press clippings about her remain in her family archive (fig. 7). Public sculptures, street signs, and even a convention center named after her exist. However, aside from these visible civic and public markers, the most poignant reminders are the anecdotes. There are oral histories recounting stories of visitors from far and wide whom she welcomed into her home and of the critical support she provided to her family members during her lifetime. Additionally, Kwali’s descendants in Suleja hope that one day, her home will be transformed into a heritage site where visitors from around the world can once again come to learn about her(fig. 8). Kwali’s legacy—especially her waterpots—is rooted in everyday life. Easily recognizable as containers, carriers, and vessels that once simply held water, they nonetheless carry memories of an incredible potter whose work continues to transcend space and time. Ladi Dosei Kwali’s pots remain testaments to her personal story and its connection to town and country.

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Before Nightfall, a 1981–82 triptych by Nilima Sheikh, imagines a scene unfolding at twilight on the campus of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, a city in the Indian state of Gujarat (fig. 1).¹ The image conjures an otherworldly landscape, with the local flora and fauna painted as swirling forms and sweeping swaths of color. Nestled on the left is the Residency Bungalow, the faculty housing that served as Sheikh’s home for nearly two decades. The open structure of the house reflects the familial nature of the community in Baroda. Artists frequently dropped by each other’s homes simply to chat, conversations in the studio often continued over the dinner table, and students addressed their teachers as bhai or ben (“brother” or “sister” in the local language, Gujarati). 

Sheikh is one of several Baroda artists whose work has been categorized in art historical scholarship as “narrative-figuration,” a term first associated with the Baroda school in the early 1980s.² This designation refers to a distinct mode of figuration adopted by artists like Bhupen Khakhar, Gulammohammed Sheikh, and Vivan Sundaram, who created paintings grounded in sociopolitical critique, images of everyday life, and narratives embedded in local settings (figs. 2, 3). However, this formalist grouping excludes their contemporaries, artists such as Nasreen Mohamedi and Jeram Patel, who were working at the same time but in a decisively abstract idiom. It also reflects a tendency in the art historical discipline to classify artists by singular stylistic affinities. Against this, I challenge the idea that a stylistic label can easily be applied to the Baroda artists and argue that writing a narrative of this school demands a closer look at the collaborations, dialogues, and influences across generations of artists who taught, worked, and lived alongside each other.

During my interviews with artists from Baroda, I expected them to describe their classroom pedagogy or to discuss the development of their visual language. Instead, our conversations turned to anecdotes about gatherings in their homes, jokes about cooking or dancing together, and memories of the “homey” atmosphere on campus. Their words, when read alongside candid archival photographs, portraits of them and their friends, and artworks depicting their shared residential spaces, paint an image of the home as an alternative site of artistic and pedagogical practices, one that was as central to their experience as the classroom and studio.³ By examining these visualizations of social spaces and the dialogues taking place within them, I recontextualize their artistic practices through a lens of community and camaraderie. I propose that this framework has implications beyond a study of the Faculty of Fine Arts in that it allows us to understand postcolonial modernity more broadly as having developed through collective efforts and informal networks of exchange rather than through the stylistic innovations of individual artists.

The Faculty of Fine Arts, founded in 1950, was the first art school established in an independent India. Over the years, the Faculty incubated generations of Indian modernists, many of whom first trained as students and later returned to teach in the same departments in which they themselves had studied. Echoing the artists’ descriptions of a “homey” campus, the college began out of a single residential bungalow called Pushpa Baug (fig. 4). This house provided a bright and open space for the art school, with a veranda and balcony on the first floor, rooms that were used for lecture halls and studio spaces, and a guesthouse that was converted into a pottery studio. In the span of a few years, the campus grew around this central space to include half a dozen buildings housing multiple departments, including painting, printmaking, and sculpture. 

As a witness to these early years, ceramist Ira Chaudhuri described an extemporaneous development of the institution, when both teachers and the administration were navigating what was, at the time, uncharted territory in the newly independent nation-state. Practicing artists were invited from across the country to set up individual departments within the school. As new positions continued to be filled and young families began moving to Baroda, it became increasingly difficult to find accommodation. It was suggested that apartments in one building be combined, so that new faculty members and their families could live together in a common residence. This ad hoc development of the school resulted in an atmosphere where artists like Ira and her husband, sculptor Sankho Chaudhuri, became local guardians for many young students arriving in Baroda, and their houses, gathering places for the growing community. Students recall that they could drop by their teachers’ homes and studios anytime, a precedent likely set by the Chaudhuris. Ira ben explained this with nonchalance, “We just never closed the front door [of our house]. It was always open. People came in and out.”⁴ Despite the Chaudhuris’ meager salaries during these early years and their frequent difficulties in making ends meet, they made their home a refuge for any student seeking a meal, a loan, or a place to stay.

The shared space of community that was inevitably created in these artists’ homes can best be described as an adda, a term translated by linguist Sunitikumar Chattopadhyay as a “place for careless talk with boon companions.”⁵ Conversations in an adda were often long, meandering, and informal. The same could be said of the conversations taking place in Baroda. Nilima Sheikh describes the gatherings at her friends’ homes as fundamental to her time at the school. Yet, when I inquired whether these discussions included pedagogical discourse or feedback on her work, she was quick to say that her peers never taught her anything in that sense. Instead, these get-togethers included “random discussions. Hanging around the college canteen. Staying late in the studio to chitchat.”⁶ These informal hangouts both within and outside of the institutional spaces allowed for a fluid or unconscious mode of pedagogical instruction and a sharing of ideas beyond the constraints of the classroom or studio. 

The recruiting of teachers from schools around the country resulted in a confluence of diverse pedagogical lineages in Baroda. Sankho Chaudhuri and K. G. Subramanyan, for example, introduced ideas and methods from their alma mater Santiniketan, a colonial-era school founded in 1901 by the writer and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore. Santiniketan was modelled after the tapovans, or forest hermitage schools of India, where teachers and students lived together as a community. Tagore’s founding vision emphasized a linking of art and the environment, villages, and folk traditions that surrounded them, and he insisted that artists move out of their studios and into public spaces. Responding directly to the existing models of art education, the Santiniketan faculty integrated community-based practices into their teaching as an ideological and anticolonial tool against the rigid pedagogy of the art schools established by the British government.⁷

In contrast, the Faculty was established in the decades immediately following independence and developed its collective practices as a specifically postcolonial proposition, one fostered by artists seeking like-minded collaborators and, for many, a community different than those they came from. Since its early years, the Faculty had attracted students from both neighboring rural regions in Gujarat and urban metropolises across India. As a result of this heterogeneity, artists moving to Baroda experienced freedoms unlike any in their hometowns. Bhupen Khakhar, for example, noted that he came to Baroda because it would have been impossible for him to stay in Bombay and paint: “My family members would not allow me. . . . At the back of my mind, it also must be my gay attitude.”⁸ Similarly, as a young girl arriving from Delhi, Nilima Sheikh recalls being surprised that she was allowed to stay out and work in the studios until late into the night.⁹ Gulammohammed Sheikh, who had moved from a smaller town in Gujarat, was made to reckon with an unfamiliar kind of cosmopolitanism: “It was a new experience for me altogether. To meet so many people in the liberal environment that the university provided—it was almost like an extended family.”¹⁰ The addas, which enabled artists to retreat into a cosmopolitan bubble on campus in an otherwise provincial town, thereby came to symbolize a mode of sociality that was unique to Baroda’s local context.¹¹ At the same time, as my interviews with the artists revealed, it also led to moments of exclusion, marginality, and difference, despite the close-knit community. I thus argue that this period was entrenched in contradictions and simultaneities—a reflection of the complicated postcolonial climate in which the school emerged.

At the crux of this narrative is also the seemingly anomalous location of Baroda, a small town removed from urban centers such as Bombay or Delhi, which had previously been the primary loci of modernist movements and art schools in India. In many ways, it was this provincial location that encouraged the sense of camaraderie and interdependence among peers. The lack of a commercial gallery system and established collectors or patrons of art eliminated a sense of competition among friends or a desire to cater to the art market. With limited opportunities to exhibit works in Baroda, students would travel together to Bombay—carrying rolled-up canvases on the train, collectively renting out gallery spaces, and installing their works there themselves. Much like the ad hoc trajectory of the institution, the artists’ entry into the art market relied on self-driven labor and collaboration among peers.  

In my conversations with art critic Geeta Kapur, she was particular about using the word “bohemianism” to describe the atmosphere in Baroda from the 1960s onward.¹² Kapur’s presence in Baroda—as one of the first critics to write about its practices—was influential. As the partner of the artist Vivan Sundaram and a close friend of several other Baroda artists, she was uniquely positioned as a witness to both their artistic trajectories and their lived experiences. Reflecting upon her memories from the time, she spoke to me of the kinds of informal and deliberately sparse conditions in which they existed. Over the years, several artists came to inhabit the same residences, often due to the lack of alternative housing, to financial hardship, or through the provision of university accommodations. Artists rarely worked in their home-studios alone and, in fact, would leave their doors open so that friends could come and go as they wished. 

Kapur’s description poetically echoes the title of Sundaram’s 1981 painting People Come and Go, which is set in Paramanand, the bungalow that the artist Bhupen Khakhar built for himself in the middle-class Baroda neighborhood of Chikuwadi (fig. 5). Khakar named the house after his father and the Sanskrit word for “supreme happiness,” foreshadowing the revelry that he hosted there in the years to come. While the house had a separate studio, Khakhar preferred to work in the room pictured above, where he could be surrounded by friends, who dropped in at all hours and engaged him in conversation while he painted. Sundaram hints at Paramanand being a place where the community convened by depicting a welcome mat strategically placed at the bottom of the stairs and showing the door to the house left ajar. Khakhar appears to be in the middle of his painting process, examining a canvas propped up against a wall. British painter Howard Hodgkin, a close friend of the Baroda artists, is shown seated behind him at leisure, with his arms outstretched and his legs casually crossed. The otherwise tranquil setting is interrupted by “glitches” in the composition—a spectral figure of Vallabhai, Khakhar’s lover at the time, floats next to him; Khakhar’s body is painted in translucent hues as if fading into the background; and the picture planes intersect one another, like where a wall panel overlaps Hodgkin’s arm. These idiosyncrasies, combined with the dreamlike pointillist light that floods the room, indicate that Sundaram was not just painting from memory but rather creating a vision of memory—a reminiscence of camaraderie and intimate friendships.

I began my research on Baroda with the awareness that the crux of my argument relied on something intangible—unrecorded conversations, veiled social relations, and ordinary moments of companionship. And although some of this narrative could be gleaned from archival materials and conversations with artists, this research would likely have remained within the realm of the speculative were it not visualized through Jyoti Bhatt’s collection of nearly 1,500 photographs of the campus and the community taken between 1956 and 1999. Much like the formation of the community in Baroda, the development of Bhatt’s photographic practice was by happenstance. Since many students were not able to afford to have their work professionally photographed, Bhatt offered to shoot it for a small sum—in essence, for the price of the necessary film—which allowed him to learn new techniques at little cost. Studying the photographs in his archive chronologically, however, reveals a branching out of his subject matter from documentation of artworks to portraits of friends and contemporaries. Otherwise unassuming photographs of artists in their studios or posing with their work are filled with glimpses of conviviality, playfulness, and collaboration. 

In one photograph from 1970, three students are seated on top of a canvas laid out on the floor, simultaneously drawing different sections of a collaborative artwork (fig. 6). In another, from 1975, more than a dozen students are spread out on a porch, sharing a meal from an array of lunch boxes set between them (fig. 7). In a third, three students sit huddled together, poring over a single book (fig. 8). Lastly, a group shot from 1974 sums up friendships in the studio; amid art supplies, canvases, and frames, we see students holding hands, leaning on one another, and mid-laughter as if caught sharing a joke (fig. 9). 

As a witness to and participant in the formation of this community, Bhatt had untethered access to these candid moments, allowing him to capture the complex undertows of friendship and camaraderie on campus. And yet, despite my place as an outsider to this community, artists spoke to me with the same sense of kinship and familiarity that I describe here. My interviews, which primarily took place in their homes, were replete with nostalgic stories, complicated reflections on the past, and above all, an openness to sharing. Like Jyoti bhai said in response to my request to meet: “ઘર ખુલ્લું છે. ગમે ત્યારેઆવો (The doors of my house are always open. Come anytime you like).”

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In a sketchbook that dates to her early student years at Framingham State College (now Framingham State University) in the mid-1970s, the artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, 1940–2025) wrote, “[I] have a brainstorm . . . to do a series of paper dolls.”¹This annotation shares the page with two drawings: a paper figure with a folded base and the tabbed outfit with which it could be paired. The clothing ensemble includes a crisply starched dress layered underneath an apron embellished with a heart-shaped appliqué spelling “Mom.” Alongside the two drawings, Smith penciled a block of ruled lines as if from a composition book and neatly printed “American Public School Education Series.”

Smith recognized dolls to be powerful pedagogical tools that could shape aspirations, perpetuate stereotypes, and ascribe or reinforce societal roles.²Below the apron-strung mother in her sketch, Smith dotted the edge of the page with words including “doctor,” “detective,” and “lawyer.” These read like a laundry list of professions that most young girls of her generation were discouraged from pursuing. Born in 1940, Smith was herself a parent while completing her postsecondary training in fine art. Well-meaning and condescending instructors alike implored her to consider becoming an art teacher, reasoning it was a more suitable and rewarding line of work for a Native American woman.³

Smith didn’t create the first of the paper dolls until the early nineties, but she never abandoned the idea in those intervening years. Some of her earliest doll works were in fact sculptures, from raggedy cloth moppets to wire figurines. In Tribal Ties (1985), two lovingly hand-stitched and pillowy dolls with button eyes embrace one another.⁴ Later, Smith made use of store-bought toys. The Red Dirt Box (1989) is wooden and pocket-size with a plastic Statue of Liberty affixed to the lid. “Give me your tired, your poor” is handwritten on one side.

The “Mother of Exiles” had come to stand for a compassionate center of power, distinct from the conquering empires of yore. In Smith’s sculpture, she is set askew, revealing the contents of the box beneath her: action figures of Plains warriors, who lay flat on their backs, half-buried in the soil. The configuration of the work suggests that righting her would bury them. The scattered plastic bodies of the warriors are solid blue and white. There are no red men, leaving the would-be trio of patriotic colors incomplete. The expression of “red” as a shorthand slur for Native Americans is reappropriated by Smith to present an image of the United States as partial and unfinished without Indigenous peoples. The Red Dirt Box upends the superficial national story of a land for one and all; colonialism is not so easily disguised. 

Smith’s artistic games are serious. Her work alludes to childhood pastimes but not for fun (although play and humor are important)—or because her professors thought it would be better for her to work with children than in the field of contemporary art—but rather because early development is when the norms of social and cultural life are established.⁵In an unpublished document from the artist’s archive, Smith imagines a conversation between a katsina figure and a Cabbage Patch doll taking place in her studio in Corrales, New Mexico, over the course of two days in 1985. The transcript, titled “Fad or Fetish,” records the speakers politely bickering over their origins and responsibilities: Who is a more American product? Who has been more commercialized? Eventually, they come to realize their similarities, including a shared disdain for the bourgeois aspirations of Barbie and Ken. They also agree that each has a role to “help make order in our worlds” and to “teach children about love, hate and nurturing.” Whether used in ceremonial and religious rites or for secular purposes, “dolls reassured the human place in the universe by acting out what the human could not do . . . but they also involve fantasizing and dreaming which made their world a better place.”⁶Dolls are instruments that can reproduce social codes, but they are also agents of change.

In 1991, Smith created Paper Dolls for a Post-Columbian World with Ensembles Contributed by the US Government, a suite of 13 xeroxed drawings tinted with watercolor and pencil.

Paper Dolls depicts an imagined family of Barbie, Ken, and young Bruce Plenty Horses, as well as the black-robed Jesuit priest Father Le de Ville––a homonym of “devil.” On the Flathead Reservation, where Smith grew up, the Jesuits operated a Federal Indian Boarding School from 1864 to 1972. This was one of more than 400 schools jointly run by missionaries and the colonial government in the United States. Like those that existed in Canada, these institutions aimed to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children into a Christian Euro-American worldview. This was done by separating them from their families, language, culture, and religion. These bitterly hostile places were rampant with abuse, and many children never made it home. Those who did survive were impacted in existential ways that Smith’s artwork carefully records.

Paper Dolls illustrates how boarding schools, land grabs, biological warfare, criminalizing ceremonial practice, and the theft of cultural belongings are interlinking strategies of genocide. As Smith once said, “People think that genocide is just about standing people in front of an open pit and shooting them. . . . They think it’s about murdering people. It’s way bigger than that.”⁷The sheet depicting the outfit for Bruce, the child, is especially demonstrative of this reality. Whereas the hospital gown or the capote or the maid’s uniform are garments alone, the “Flathead child’s boarding school outfit,” as Smith labeled it, comes complete with a figure.

The teacherly style of Smith’s handwritten notations is a direct response to the historical fallacies printed in textbooks and otherwise circulating widely at the time. These were the frenzied years leading up to the Columbian Quincentenary in 1992. Major cultural organizations received grants to develop blockbuster projects and exhibitions, many of which perpetuated a narrative of “encounter and exchange” between Indigenous peoples and European invaders––a perspective that offered a benign and teachable framework of multicultural harmony. To some, this even felt like a progressive step, an update of the older “discover and conquer” model. Students of history would learn that things were bad but that now they’re good, while absolving settler society of wrongdoing. “That’s what 1992 was about,” Smith recalled. “This whole big propaganda machine in America was overwhelming the whole story. Making up a new story. I couldn’t stand it.”⁸Smith’s infuriation catalyzed a few strategic shifts that she began to make at the time.

Paper Dolls is unusual as a drawing in that there are multiple sets.⁹It pushes against the categorical line that separates a drawing from a print. Smith was an expert printmaker, having worked with the renowned Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, since 1979.¹⁰She could have easily created Paper Dolls as an editioned lithograph, for example, but instead produced the work more like the handbills and fliers that plaster streets and circulate on the ground during times of political activity. Indeed, a reproduction of Smith’s Paper Dolls landed on the cover of How to ’92: Model Actions for a Post-Columbian World.¹¹This interventionist booklet offers a guide for do-it-yourself actions to counter the misinformation of the quincentenary: how to mount a demonstration, how to initiate media campaigns, and how to petition for curricular revisions. By opting to draw Paper Dolls, Smith may have intentionally created some distance from the master matrix that printmaking relies upon. This artwork underscores the violence of enforcing a singular worldview, and drawing allowed Smith to forego identical impressions for a process more intimately connected to uniqueness and individuality. One drawing was maybe not enough to reach the audience she needed, given what was at stake, but perhaps several versions would be.

In 2021, Smith returned to the idea of paper dolls.

Even though her practice had always been invested in contemporary politics, this was an exceptional moment of prescience. The revisitation of this work coincided with the announcement of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. The final volume of the investigative report was released in 2024. “For the first time in the history of the United States,” Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior, declared, “the federal government is accounting for its role in operating historical Indian boarding schools that forcibly confined and attempted to assimilate Indigenous children.”¹²This comprehensive federal effort outlined recommendations to recognize the legacy of these policies with the goal of addressing intergenerational trauma and providing a path toward healing.

Paper Dolls from 2021 shares its name with the earlier series, but Smith transformed the scale and the material. The installation involves nearly life-size aluminum cutouts of the painted figures and their outfits. Smith designed them so that they come away from the wall, creating a dimension of depth and shadow. The imagery is identical to the earlier work, but the written descriptions are absent. Whereas the paper versions were carriers of explanations and historical facts, the sculptural dolls—which connect to Smith’s earliest approach to doll-making—are physically embodied. It is as if the core of Smith’s lesson to audiences today is one of relationality. The history is important, but so is our position toward it in the present. “My messages are about things that have happened in the past that impact what’s happening today,”¹³she maintained.

Smith was awarded four honorary doctorates over the course of her lifetime and an honorary baccalaureate from Salish Kootenai College, an accredited tribal college founded in 1978 that offers essential services to those in her home community. Smith was a longtime supporter of Salish Kootenai’s library and arts programs. In her speech for the school’s 2015 commencement ceremony she began, “This honorary degree from Salish Kootenai means more to me than all four honorary doctorates from mainstream universities.”¹⁴Encouraging the students seated before her, she continued, “My story is about how a child develops resiliency and coping mechanisms in a difficult and disenfranchised world.”¹⁵Smith’s relationship to the classroom was one she navigated with criticality and determination. Her role as a teacher was neither vocational nor a consolation to her. She was deliberate in how, when, and where she taught, and her artwork became one of most powerful platforms from which she advocated for education. Smith used dolls throughout her practice in service of that wider strategy, as an unassuming yet powerful motif to redress political and cultural injustices.

In Memory of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940-2025).

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith Paper Dolls for a Post-Columbian World 1991 is currently on view in Gallery 208 at MoMA.

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The somewhat offhand archive called Track Changes nests in the permanent, and therefore more premeditated, display of the art collection of the Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center at the University of the Philippines in Manila. The items in this collection are organized according to a loose art-historical diachrony and within broadly conceived tropes of light, province, unease, and passage. Layered around this nucleus of privileged objects are select contemporary artworks and archival materials. The latter comprise Track Changes, which aims to introduce the public to the archives of the Vargas Museum and the University of the Philippines. The clusters of things are rendered equivalent to and contemporaneous with the encounter of the art through a paracuratorial supplement that exists adjacently to the collection; this arrangement enhances a porous scenography that pursues the interdisciplinarity research inscribed in the word “Filipiniana,” which may mean anything, and so everything, or at the very least, something Philippine. And because Track Changes reminds the public that the museum is the custodian of more than just art as validated by an elite and an expert class, it alerts them to the redistribution of the values of the motley “stuff” of which the museum is steward.

In certain ways, the initiation is an insertion into the stable canon of the collection, thus alluding to a “distraction,” to drag or to pull in different directions in Latin and late Middle English, but not altogether a disruption. It is a practical diversion, so to speak, a delay of expectation consisting of vitrines resting on the spindly legs of wooden tables that may easily be moved or stored. The room housing the collection is surrounded by glass, the panes of which are framed by aluminum, and dappled by various illuminations at different times of the day from the outside. Not a typical white cube, it situates the viewer amid art and nature in a kind of wraparound transparency that instills the feeling of being in a museum and, at the same time, experiencing a kind of continuum with external happenstance, be it rain or a riot. Track Changes is both implicit and complicit, receding and advancing within the institution but not seeking a center; in fact, it is at the sides, flush to the glass wall and so invites oblique reading in the way of an annotation or an aside. While sufficiently present, it is neither ubiquitous nor conspicuous: rather, it is intermingled and intermittent though delicately indented.

The initiation into this endeavor is titled The Native Strain: Guillermo Tolentino and Aurelio Alvero. It focuses on the relationship between Jorge B. Vargas (1890–1980), collector and donor of the collection; artist-professor Guillermo Tolentino (1890–1976); and curator-critic Aurelio Alvero (1913–1958). These three figures are related at certain nodes. Vargas collected the stalwart academic sculptor Tolentino, and Alvero helped Vargas set up his collection. Furthermore, the archives of Tolentino are in the University of the Philippines, which administers the Vargas collection and where Vargas was a student in its first law class and later a regent. Relating Tolentino and Alvero to Vargas is particularly intriguing as it gives us a glimpse into the aesthetic and political implications of making art, making nationalisms, and making museums in the interwar, war, and postwar years in the Philippines.

Jorge Vargas aspired to a postwar national culture through an art collection, as stated in the founding papers of the collection. The latter yield references to cultural heritage being vital for a “young Republic” and the logic of art being a kind of “accumulation” that serves as a gauge of a “level of culture.” According to a 1948 document that conceptually forms the basis of the Vargas collection, the pieces are viewed as “representative of a national art.” The first catalogue, published in 1943, spells out the aims of the collection: “‘encouraging Filipino artists and assisting in the presentation of their works’ . . . helping ‘Filipinos to know and treasure our cultural heritage’. . . and . . . contributing ‘to the proper presentation of Philippine art.’”¹ Vargas commissioned modernist painter Victorio Edades (1895–1985), who studied architecture and mural-making at the University of Washington in Seattle and worked in a salmon cannery in Alaska, to write the first catalogue of his collection; and Alvero completed a catalogue of his own collection titled Art in Tagala (1942/1944).² These efforts may well be the earliest anthologies of art criticism and curatorial writing in the Philippines to the degree that they attempted close readings of works in a collection.

Alvero and Tolentino were nativists who exalted the pre-Hispanic Philippine lifeworld; at the same time, they were decisively (other)worldly, advocates of abstraction and builders of monuments. The term “nativist” is deployed here as a provocation and pertains to the range of articulations that may be considered not-yet or never-to-become colonial (and therefore potentially national or nationalist) or, perhaps, the basis of the exemplary folklore that is the nation, or its afterlife via a new folkloristics in the contemporary. Tolentino was a sculptor of the classical tradition, of the heroic and allegorical kind, and a spiritist who convened séances. He also proffered claims on the Philippine primeval such as its writing system or script, spinning some esoteric codes and wildly transhistorical comparisons.

Jorge Vargas was born into a family that had significant interests in sugar in the central Philippine islands of the Visayas. He was a political figure in the Philippines, its first executive secretary, who served the governments of the United States and Japan from 1935 to 1945. Apart from playing a vital role in American bureaucracy with various portfolios including defense and agriculture, Vargas was invested in the scouting movement, international sports, and the collecting of a gamut of things that, from art to ashtrays, included stamps, coins, photographs, books, and documents, inter alia. He was accused of conniving with the Japanese and later convicted, only to be absolved by the postwar government. He donated his collection to the University of the Philippines, which opened the museum in his name in 1987.

Kept in the vitrines of Track Changes are important texts that tend to inflect the trope of the Philippine bildung. Tolentino’s excursus references a deep past, an ancient ethnic and racial community lying beyond the strictly colonial and imperialist civilization. For instance, in Ang Wika at Baybaying Tagalog (The Language and Script of Tagalog, 1937), he unfolds an almost encyclopedic account of the Philippines through the different systems of knowledge, describing flora, fauna, and people in lofty and idiosyncratic Tagalog, an ethnolinguistic marker of communities around the capital of Manila.³ Tolentino illustrated some of the pages, including the one imagining how the Tower of Babel might have looked from an interplanetary perspective and in the context of the birth of Tagalog as one of the world’s languages.

Alvero, who opened his collection to the public in 1942, was born to intellectuals. His father was the painter and interior decorator Emilio Alvero (1886–1955), and his mother was Rosa Sevilla (1879–1954), founder of the Instituto de Mujeres (1900), the first Filipino-run lay Catholic school for women. He was an accomplished orator and took up law and education simultaneously. He was a poet and taught English, history, and the Tagalog language. He was tried as a Japanese collaborator and imprisoned from 1945 to 1947 and from 1950 to 1952. He cofounded the Young Philippines, a fringe nationalist party of the 1930s advocating that “The Political Salvation of the World Lies in Dictatorship Rather than Democracy.” Alvero founded a “quasi-fascist, blue-shirted” organization that was modeled on groups in Germany, Italy, and Spain.⁴ He went by the name of Magtanggul Asa, which in the local language means “Defending Hope,” and wrote prodigiously on Philippine culture. A case deserving closer study is the monograph titled The First Exhibition of Non-Objective Art in Tagala written in 1954 in Manila, in which he theorizes the rubric of the “non-objective” based on the First Non-Objective Art Exhibition in the Philippines, which opened in 1953 at the modernist nerve center in postwar Manila, the Philippine Art Gallery. Here, he would realign the idiom of western abstraction twice: first through the term “non-objective” and second through “Tagala,” a reference to the dominant ethnic society in the country that is appropriated presumably as an alternative to the colonial appellation of the archipelago, which is the Philippines, the genealogy of Filipiniana. With Alvero and Tolentino looming in the mindset of Vargas, the absolute and the occult alternate with the self-conscious and the internationalist to conjure the fantasy of the modern. 

Alongside documents related to Vargas, Alvero, and Tolentino, the vitrines also contain visual material from the Japanese occupying forces that portray the Americans as murderous, while promising social stability and prosperity through the banking system, health service, and a market economy under their auspices. Curiously, in their illustrations, which are veritable wartime propaganda, the template is American comics and editorial cartoons, thus indicating a persistence of American popular visuality across colonial cultures.

To discuss Vargas, Tolentino, and Alvero as an ensemble is to anticipate a theoretical and historiographic framework of the Philippine modern that considers the aesthetic, artifactual, and discursive implications of the archival material inscribed in or ornamenting the collection. What might be offered here concomitantly is a method that contemplates the postcolonial modern through a paracuratorial visibility. In this regard, the modern is not singularly intuited as a mode of progress or criticality; like the vitrines in Track Changes, this modern is, as alluded to earlier, offhand. For the ethos of Vargas insisted on a certain pleasure in appreciating the distracting collectible, perhaps an elaboration of the desire to belong to an abstract collective.

The term “kawilihan” is key. Kawilihan was the name of Vargas’s residential complex and the site of the collection before its transfer to the university. It roughly translates as fascination, distraction, or absorption. It shapes the time and pursuit of leisure, even of reverie. The complex was imagined as Pleasantville and was part of the development of the suburbs of Manila. It had a garden where Vargas raised vegetables, chickens, and pigs, and ample spaces where he hosted costume parties. Besides being a concept-work, kawilihan was also real estate, the land that bought and preserved the art.

The care and thoughtfulness that sustained fascination and the longing for culture would not have found its distinct institutional framework had Vargas not settled on an intellectual scheme that braided culture and nation, not to mention art and garden. It was a scheme seen within the context of fondness for materials in a collection thriving on heterogeneity and later subjected to analysis in a university museum. Across these interactions, the collection would feed into a life of ferment, speculation, and scholarship. These three impulses of fascination, culture, and university animate the collecting instinct of Vargas and the collection. The phrase “university museum” holds two of modernity’s most consummate bureaucracies: the university and the museum, from which stem the prospects of enlightenment and radical epistemology through knowing and sensing. The alternation between homegrown joy and critical institution is instructive.

The joy derives from kawilihan. It is at once residence, collection, museum. Its root “wili” is also attentiveness, interest, penchant, liking, pleasure, enjoyment. In the early lexicon, it straddles between afección (in Juan de Noceda and Pedro San Lucar), a profound, deep-seated affection on the one hand, and afición (in Pedro San Buenaventura), a habit, inclination, talent, or an enthusiasm on the other. These words gravitate toward “love”; in one Filipino translation of “wili,” it is considered “mataos na pagmamahal,” or a lofty devotion to a beloved.⁵ If kawilihan as a structure of feeling hangs over a particular sensitivity to a precious belonging, then it is a cognate of the ethos of care and inevitably of curation in the sense of a possession being under the care or in the custody of, or of curiosity, the inquisitiveness about things. Because the state of kawilihan or the condition of wili is absorption, love becomes a discursive articulation of the word: the collector, or lover, loses the self, which is absorbed in the collection.

In the Pedro Serrano Laktaw dictionary, the absorbed subject is an “aficionado, apegado, encariñado,” that is, generally attached, and a connoisseur. Such cultivated attachment and connoisseurship are mediated by an object of desire. The example of the lexicographer is intriguingly allegorical and potentially moral: “Hindi mawiwili ang aso, / kundi binibigyan nang buto.”⁶ The dog will not be engaged if not given a bone. Wili, therefore, hinges the subject to the object for it to be distracted.

Criticality informs the second aspect, specifically how the conceptualization of culture and the state, or how the state represents the polity through culture, or the ethical necessity of representativeness for a common image of an ethical community that professes the symbolic birthright of a tradition.⁷ To be more concrete in the Philippine historical context, the trope of the American Commonwealth and the Japanese Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere speaks to a collective and expansionist imaginary rooted in colonial history. And the sui generis Vargas was right at the center of these projects and at the same time the collector of the evolving Filipiniana of the Philippines. No other figure in Philippine history rivals his acumen and dexterity in terms of the country’s political and aesthetic education. The historian Teodoro Agoncillo, who wrote a detailed account of the Vargas collaboration case, opines that the “collaboration question was . . . the brainchild of the Americans who, acting under the pressure of the prevailing war psychosis, dictated to the hapless Filipinos what they should and should not do or think in relation to the incidents and accidents of the war.”⁸

What Track Changes does is to create a relationality between the historiography, which is also the museology, of colonial and modern art and the curatorial supplement that is not programmatic or thematic, but rather contingent and tropic. It insinuates itself from within the institution and beside, or within reach of, the displayed collection to hopefully choreograph, or subtly incite, the frisson of “situated knowledge” across the varia or corpora in the room. In other words, the paracuratorial in this instance coordinates, hints at, a cognitive mapping of things in a tentative totality without lapsing into ideological iconography or art-historical repetition. The “para-” turns out to also be “proto-” in that it reveals symptoms of the museological unconscious of Vargas as well as the apparatus that enabled the collection to cohere and then ramify across temporalities through curatorial activation. The native, the national, and the non-objective suffuse this utterance of the modern—all caught up in contradictions but also pointing to a third moment beyond the dualisms that underlie all stylizations of coloniality and its attendant class-, gender-, race-continuous discriminations. Track Changes proves to be a viable intersectional site that cannot be quickly co-opted by narrow specialization and the positivisms it attracts.

The native, the national, and the non-objective initiate a relay between expressions of the subjectivity that is the Philippine, construed as a figurine and not an identity. The latter dilates across the said three registers in which various imaginaries coalesce to generate particular phases, and plasticities, of modernity: the supposed authenticity of the indigenous (the native), the idealized cultural character of postcolonial autonomy (the national), and the eccentric entitlement to a transcultural and international abstraction (the non-objective) in which all empirical and rational references are banished as if to perform the purity of the native and the melancholic hubris of the national. In a certain way, the Philippine is all of these, condensing in the acquisitive personas of Vargas, Tolentino, and Alvero, who communed with the archaic, the multitude, and the dead—all taken by liberal sympathies, cabinets of curiosity of their own. In this sequence of categories, the notion of the modern becomes exceptionally complex, interpellated by the difficult desires of belonging, and not belonging, to the aesthetic polity of the colonial western by sketching out a cognate genealogy of the Kantian sensus communis: the bodies of willful subjects, which include the collector, the collection, and the culture. This can only be the very groundwork of the museum, its curatorial substrate, when it renders the art ambiguously present in its space, “derived from distractive experience” and turned into an “abstraction of bits of the world.”⁹ Modern art critic Richard Shiff brings distraction, abstraction, and the (non)objective together rhythmically: as the art is grasped so does it “draw away” and “draw apart” from how it is sensed as actually existing and how its becoming real is not only poignantly, but also punctually prefigured.¹⁰

To end with another distraction: In 2022, the Philippine government asked the Vargas Museum to temporarily keep and curate the collection of about five hundred pieces from the collection of Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled the country from 1965 to 1986, at a time when the couple’s son Ferdinand Marcos Jr. had become president. The items in the collection comprise paintings on canvas, glass, and wood. They are crafted from the tradition of lacquer, egg tempera and copper, and the ornament of gold leaf, among other mediums. These objects are paintings from the late Gothic and Rococo periods in Italy, reverse glass paintings from former Yugoslavia of folk-fantastic style and called “naif” in Southeast Europe, and lacquer vanity cases and religious icons from Russia. The Marcos government was hailed as developmentalist and cosmopolitan but was deposed by a popular uprising in the wake of autocracy and allegedly massive thieving.

While not cohabiting with the display of the collection and Track Changes, the Marcos collection finds its place alongside the Vargas Collection guided by a kindred paracuratorial sensibility. The task of a university museum is to invite a mindful and urgent study of these objects as well as the tricky lives of Vargas and Ferdinand Marcos, both of whom were enmeshed in the history of colonialism, the formation of nation-states, the accumulation of wealth, and the status itself of objects in collections. With their contentious imbrication as the ecology, essential questions may be revisited: What is an object? How does it become property or patrimony? Why is it in the world, why are we around it, and what do we as subjects do about it?

When the initiatory and coincidental Track Changes asks these same questions, digressively and not aggressively or even transgressively, it drags and pulls the museum in different directions, paracuratorially. As the title “Track Changes” suggests, it traces the indicia of amendments to the text, the writing itself of difference—or the difference finally of curatorial writing.

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In the etching Youth (1965; fig. 1), a contemplative figure sits atop a globe, head resting on a knee, legs twisted together, arms tucked protectively into the body. The figure’s head, which is turned inward, counterposes the frontal, downcast face in the lower left foreground. It is this face that the etching’s maker, Ugandan artist and professor Catherine Nankya Katonoko Gombe, states was the origin point for the work itself, its tender melancholy invoking the difficulties of her childhood following “the death of [her] father at a tender age and the struggle to continue with education.”¹Youth is one of three prints pulled from plates etched by Gombe in her final year in the printmaking course offered by the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts (MTSIFA) at Makerere University, then part of the University of East Africa.² The 1965 class was a historic one. Alongside Gombe was a small cohort of students proficient in etching, woodcut, linocut, aquatint, and lithography. This class was the first to complete the full four years of Makerere’s new graphic art undergraduate program, founded in 1961 by Royal College of Art–trained artist Michael Adams. With its multiple textures, sinewy lines, shifts from abstraction to figuration, and plays with vertiginous perspective, Youth reflects Gombe’s notable skill. The central figure represents the apotheosis of her unlikely journey from childhood trauma to expert printmaker. However, any sense of triumph inferred by the body’s planetary perch is tempered by the anxieties inherent in the figure’s hunched pose. The sense of a precipice, or “dark hollow” beyond, speaks directly to what Gombe has recalled was “the mental uncertainty of the next path.”³

Youth, part of a trio on the theme of “Journey,” is an explicitly personal work, in which Gombe deployed her newfound printmaking skills to convey the complexities of her personal trajectory. Nonetheless, its conflicting themes and formal experimentations resonate more broadly with the school’s creative energies and tensions, providing initial insights into lesser-explored aspects of art-making at Makerere in the 1960s. Alongside prints by her classmates, such as Modest Wealth (1964; fig. 2) by Augustine Alirwana Mugalula-Mukiibi (1943–2019), Gombe’s work is a reminder that beyond the school’s better-known programs in painting and sculpture—which had, over the previous decade and a half, produced and then been led by renowned artists Sam J. Ntiro (1923–1993), Gregory Maloba (1922–2004), Elimo Njau (born 1932), Theresa Musoke (born 1944), and Francis Nnaggenda (born 1936), among others—printmaking was a burgeoning field at the heart of public creative expression in the early years of independence.

Kampala, a thriving creative city, was the locus of several young, innovative, graphic-rich publications including Roho and Transition, which were printed by Uganda Argus Ltd.⁴The printmaking equipment that Adams installed at the university—a physically demanding process that he has described as “acids and fingers, hot plates and turpentine, a dangerous beginning”—enabled his students to produce imagery that fed directly into their pages.⁵ Adams, himself a painter and a printmaker, designed several iconic covers for Transition, including the 1966 cover featuring a green, red, and yellow playing card design to accompany an essay by Ali Mazrui (1933–2014) on Kwame Nkrumah, the “Leninist tzar”; the 1967 cover featuring a sardonic cartoon that accompanies an essay by Paul Theroux on Tarzan, the “first expatriate”; and an ominous design from 1968 (fig. 3) dominated by a vulture for the issue focused on the Biafran civil war.⁶

At Makerere, Adams was, as Sunanda Sanyal has discussed, a provocateur unafraid of confronting a growing art world elitism.⁷This is most evident in an editorial he published in Transition in 1962 (when Gombe, Mugalula-Mukiibi, and others were in their second year), in which he denounces critics as failed artists who “stopped understanding when they stopped being creative.”⁸ In this text, he argues that the gap between high and low is relative, that both Michelangelo and Mickey Mouse constitute a “worldy experience,” and that the postcards people buy of each are, ultimately, “the same size.” Below his text, there is a small, abstract, graphic work titled Clouds, which appears like a crystalline, stratigraphic slice underscoring the idea that encounters with creative expression need not be confined to the hallowed gallery space. Adams was an inspiring teacher, one whom Gombe remembered fondly nearly sixty years later. The sentiment, it seems, was mutual. In 2021, thinking back on the class of 1965, Adams wrote “When my 4th year students left, I knew I had to follow. They had graduated me.”⁹

As Serubiri Moses has recently discussed in reference to Gombe’s contemporary Theresa Musoke­ (born 1944), who won the prize for painting in 1965, the art school in the mid-1960s was both energized by Uganda’s independence in 1962 and challenged by an increasing emphasis on formalism.¹⁰The latter had been introduced by Scottish artist Cecil Todd (1912–1986), who took over leadership of the school in 1959 and worked to shift the curriculum away from Margaret Trowell’s essentialist pedagogy promoting the belief that African artistic education should prioritize a “native” intuition free of Western influence.¹¹In its place, Todd instituted a rigorous, academic program in which students studied artworks from the Western canon, took life drawing classes, and were encouraged to gain mastery in a variety of mediums. His school sought to offer an internationalist art education, and yet it did so within a climate that the new nation state could not help but inspire.

Moses argues that Musoke rejected Todd’s formalism and turned instead to surrealist representations of nature inspired by East Africa’s rich flora and fauna.¹²Musoke herself took printmaking classes, and her woodcut of guinea fowl, as Moses discusses, appeared in Transition in 1963. Musoke’s evident interest in wildlife was shared by many of her contemporaries, reflecting the concern for conservation that proliferated in the wake of independence. The second issue of Roho: Journal of the Visual Arts of East Africa (1962), for example, features an excerpt from the Arusha Manifesto (1961), a foundational document in East African conservation, as well as an essay by Kenyan zoologist and Makerere professor David Wasawo that calls upon readers to recognize the urgent need for preservation, especially in an age of ever-growing tourism.¹³Wasawo’s text is accompanied by twelve graphic depictions of animals, all of them the work of Makerere printmaking students—including Fatma Abdullah (1939-1994) , whose abstracted, writhing mass Python occupies a full half-page.

Contemporaneous artworks evidence that beyond Roho’s diminuitive illustrations, Adams’s students developed more complex works on the theme of Uganda’s wildlife, employing a range of printmaking techniques to evoke particular qualities. In figure 4, which is by a currently unknown artist, what Adams describes as a “free-wheeling line and perfect mastery of black-and-white form” conspire to convey a sinuous scene of busy, mischievous primates. The wide-eyed backward glance of the figure in the center left, in particular, has a cartoonish quality that seems to speak to a playfulness inspired by Adams’s own irreverent disregard for “sterile” and “imitative perfection.”¹⁴ At the same, Mugalula-Mukiibi’s work (see fig. 2) demonstrates material mastery through precision cracking of the wax on the etching plate to create a vignette that conflates the hardy bodies of Uganda’s iconic Ankole longhorn cattle with the parched earth of the harsh, desert climate in which they thrive. These works superceded Todd’s formalist insistences, pushing the material qualities of printmaking processes to elevate conservationist agendas and affront elitism—while also satisfying the appetite for new national icons.

Unlike her classmates, Gombe did not depict Ugandan fauna. She did, however, feature a large, indigenous banana leaf in the foreground of her etching, depicting it in a torn state to accentuate an atmosphere of “abundance . . . and uncertainty.”¹⁵Like Mugalula-Mukiibi’s mobilization of etching’s formal qualities to infer Ankole hardiness, Gombe’s work retains a clear index of its process of production in the rendering of the map of the African continent in reverse. For the final project display, Gombe was asked to mount the actual plate she had produced, and so she chose to etch the map the correct way around for those viewing it. The resulting print, Youth, therefore represents the continent as a mirror image of itself, serving as a reminder that it was the plate itself that was the primary subject of examination. Importantly, however, the star that marks Uganda centrally on the equator remains unchanged, as the central anchor in both the etched plate and its subsequent printed manifestation. These details in Gombe’s and Mugalula-Mukiibi’s work emphasize that Makerere’s first printmaking students did not simply prioritize form over content, but rather consciously experimented with the material specificities of the former to create new representations of the latter.

In a work so deeply entrenched in Ugandan imagery, it is hard not to sense in Gombe’s anxieties about the future a broader trepidation regarding the fate of the young nation state. In 1965, tensions between Uganda’s first president, King Edward Muteesa II of Buganda, and its prime minister, Milton Obote, were rife, with the latter overthrowing the former within a year, and Idi Amin seizing power only five years later. Despite the immense difficulties and trauma of the ensuing years, both Mugalula-Mukiibi and Gombe went on to forge successful careers as artists and academics. Their printmaking training at Makerere stood them in good stead, instilling in both a lifelong attentiveness to material qualities and to Ugandan cultural iconography and heritage. Prior to his passing in 2019, Mugulalu-Mukiibi had enjoyed a long career as a master printmaker, developing, in particular, new techniques for printing on Ugandan bark cloth, which he exhibited internationally. Catherine Nankya Katonoko Gombe has similarly pursued a career steeped in the protection and celebration of historic heritages, obtaining a PhD from Kenyatta University in arts education, and publishing and teaching on ceramics, basket weaving, and bark cloth to this day. ¹⁶

As with many of the works produced at Makerere in the 1960s, Youth was sold shortly after it was made. It was bought by Scottish writer and campaigner Naomi Mitchison on a visit to Kampala, and was sent for inclusion in the Argyll Collection, a public art initiative she had set up to provide rural, Highland communities an access to art.¹⁷Seeing the work again in 2021 after a long hiatus, Gombe was struck by the complexities of emotions that it evoked: “Happy and sad moments, achievements and struggles, self-assurance and uncertainty.”¹⁸More than anything, however, Youth reminded her of critical childhood guidance. As she recalled, “My mother repeatedly told me, ‘Bwoba toyagala emirimu ginno, soma ennyo,’which translates as ‘If you do not like these chores, study hard.’” Academic success, she understood, would be liberating, a mantra that has guided her six-decade career as an artist and educator.

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The work of Nigerian woman artist Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu (1928–2003) offers a window into cultural representations of African men and women in postcolonial Nigeria. In what was a male-dominated art scene in the 1960s, Ugbodaga-Ngu stood out not only because of her visual production, but also because of her intellectual involvement as a faculty member at the Nigerian College of Art, Sciences and Technology (renamed Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria in 1962). Despite her contribution to the history of modernist art, little has been published on her role in the advancement of art during this period or on her far-reaching influence as an art educator. This post feature foregrounds Ugbodaga-Ngu’s role in the structural development of art in Nigeria, the themes that were of particular interest to her, and how she represented cultural identity, practice, and experience in her painting.

Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu was born in Kano, Nigeria, in 1928. Although most biographies state that she was born in 1921 and died in 1996, The Nigerian Artist of the Millennium: Historian, Builder, Aesthetician and Visioner (2004) notes that she was born in 1928 and died in 2003. ¹ This source is likely to be more accurate, not just because it was documented by a professor of art history in the university where she first worked as a faculty member, but because it is aimed at filling a research gap on the biographies of Nigerian artists. Ugbodaga-Ngu taught art in mission schools from 1945 to 1950, when she received a scholarship from the colonial administration to study art at the Chelsea School of Art in London. Four years later, in 1954, she received a National Diploma in Design, with a distinction in painting. A year after that, in 1955, she was awarded an Art Teacher’s Diploma from the Institute of Education, University of London. She was a contemporary of Ben Enwonwu (Odinigwe Benedict Chukwukadibia Enwonwu, 1917–1994), though their work is equally good, hers did not receive the same critical attention because it had been produced by a woman. This is, however, not to deny that some narratives accompany her rarely seen work in galleries, but they are mostly dispersed. 

As an art educator, artist, and arts administrator, Ugbodaga-Ngu contributed to advancing modernism in Nigerian art in the mid-twentieth century and its elaboration in the decades that followed. ² She was the first Nigerian artist-intellectual and woman appointed to teach the first and second generations of art students at the site of the former Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, now Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria (ABU), where she was a faculty member from 1955 to 1964. At the beginning of her career at ABU, she was not popular with her white colleagues, “who felt, she was not supposed to be there.” ³ However, she remained committed to her work during this period, as she taught Life Drawing, Imaginative Composition, and Painting. Ikpakronyi, ⁴ In 1959, she was awarded a Ford Foundation Fellowship that enabled her to accept a lecturership at the Institute of Education at the University of Ibadan. ⁵ Later, she served as a temporary part-time research fellow at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ife where, in 1964, she wrote a paper on Yoruba ibeji carvings. ⁶

After her departure from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria for some years, Ugbodaga-Ngu resumed teaching at ABU again after 1966, having raised her four children—three boys and a girl. ⁷ She continued to lecture at ABU in the 1970s, before Solomon Wangboje (1930–1998) was head of the Department of Fine Arts at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria (1972–75). ⁸ This is significant because it draws attention to a period when she probably left ABU again. Apart from teaching, in 1975, she served as a state advisor to the Second Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC 1977), a pioneering Nigerian festival held in Lagos in 1977 to celebrate Black artists from across Africa and its diaspora. This event was significant in the advancement of art beyond academia in Nigeria and on the African continent at large. She returned to lecturing at the University of Benin in 1980 during Professor D. W. A. Baikie’s tenure as vice-chancellor (1979–85). ⁹

In 1959, as part of the effort to expand and nationalize the curricular offerings in the ABU art department, Ugbodaga-Ngu invited Ben Enwonwu to deliver a lecture on contemporary Nigerian art and Timothy Adebanjo Fasuyi (born 1935), her former student, to speak on traditional Nigerian art. ¹⁰These presentations set the decolonizing stage—along with efforts by other African intellectuals and artists such as Iba N’diaye (1928–2008) and Papa Ibra Tall (1935–2015), both of Ecole National des Beaux-Arts in Senegal, and Francis Nnaggenda (born 1936) of Makerere Art School in Uganda. ¹¹

This was a period when attempts were being made to create national identities and public cultures that would reflect a distinctively African art. In Nigeria, as a result, artistic practice increasingly focused on aspects of Nigerian cultural and artistic heritage, albeit infused with European technique. Ugbodaga-Ngu’s first generation of students, which included Timothy Adebanjo Fasuyi, Solomon Wangboje, Uche Okeke (1933–2016), Yusuf Grillo (1934–2021), Demas Nwoko (born 1935), Simon Okeke (1937–1969), Bruce Onobrakpeya (born 1932), and William Olaosebikan, among other pioneers, went on to form the Zaria Art Society. Not all of them opposed the imported curriculum and colonial imprint of the Royal College of Art. What they universally rejected, however, was their British lecturers’ abhorrence of the incorporation of African art references in their work. ¹² In response, they drew upon diverse African cultural and aesthetic traditions in decolonizing visual practice they defined as “natural synthesis.”

Ugbodaga-Ngu’s educational qualifications and status as an intellectual were far-reaching in their influence. Many of her students obtained certificates in art education, or the so-called Art Teacher’s Diploma, upon completing their training in art. ¹³ Recollecting the impact of his teachers on his artistic development, Kolade Oshinowo (born 1948), who studied painting at ABU from 1968 to 1972, observed that he was fortunate to have “serious and dedicated lecturers like Professor Charles Argent, Mrs. Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu, [and] Messrs. Mike Tailor and Clary Nelson-Cole.” Oshinowo further expressed, “These are people who helped me a great deal in laying the foundation upon which my practice is built today.” ¹⁴ His reference to Ugbodaga-Ngu, in particular, stresses how much she contributed to shaping the direction of his creative process. 

An image of a Fulani milkmaid titled Agwoi (1960) by Uche Okeke, one of Ugbodaga-Ngu’s students, references the vernacular term used to describe people of Fulani descent in Nigeria. The invocation of a milkmaid in Fulani culture reflects the concept of “natural synthesis” in its referencing of not just the maid’s braided hair which highlights a mode of body beautification and adornment, but the intricately decorated calabashes used for collecting and storing cow milk for the day’s business.

Apart from the contributions discussed above, Ugbodaga-Ngu played other significant roles in the development of modernist art in Nigeria. She featured as a regular television guest artist in Ibadan in the 1960s, and participated in several group exhibitions in Europe and the United States. She had solo exhibitions in London 1958, in Lagos and Ibadan in 1959, in Boston in 1963, and again in Ibadan in 1964. ¹⁵

During this time, she developed her own idiosyncratic language; one influenced not only by European art tradition, but also by African motifs and forms drawn from different cultures in northern and southern Nigeria. Some of her works of this period combine the vitality of the northern Nigerian aristocrat with the vivacious and sensuous festival dancers of southern Nigeria, producing in some cases, tension, and in others, repose and calm. ¹⁶ The dominant aesthetic formation of the postcolonial era in Nigeria, as elsewhere on the African continent, took African culture as its paradigm. Some of the major ideologies that shaped this aesthetic were Pan-Africanism, Négritude, and Natural Synthesis. These movements were integral to decolonization and, ultimately, to independence. Although Ugbodaga-Ngu’s paintings are not easily accessible, the few that can be traced indicate her alignment with this paradigm.

Close inspection of her work reveals that she also drew inspiration from Hausa cultural traditions and the lived experience of diverse people in northern Nigeria. This is evident in the range of thematic preoccupations expressed in her paintings, in works such as Abstract (1960), Market Women (1961), and Beggars (1963). Other works, including Palm Wine Seller (1963) and Dancers (1965),reference cultural practices and festival scenes from southern Nigeria. 

Abstract, a highly textural painting, boldly explores color and shapes adopted by European artists in their exploration of African shapes and forms. One Western artist whose style possibly inspired Ugbodaga-Ngu was Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), largely because “Picasso [was] an all-encompassing symbol in the minds of many African artists.” ¹⁷ Despite this stance, Ugbodaga-Ngu did not emulate his style, but rather drew inspiration from the Andalusian to define her own form of abstraction. Her peculiar individual style is evident in this painting, in which she applied the lessons of cubism to her own composition. The picture plane reveals the arrangement of diverse geometric shapes and forms, suggestive of a bull in its rich, earthy color palette but equally evocative of traditional African art in its sculptural forms. The bull’s two “horns” are rendered as thick curved lines, and the animal appears to be in a restive position. This subject matter might have been inspired by Picasso’s bull series and also scenic views of bulls in the northern Nigerian landscape. The sight of cattle is an everyday experience for people who live in the north, and Fulani herders grazing cattle or bulls owned by Hausa households are likewise common.

Market Women (1961) signals the construction of gendered social identity, drawing attention to the socioeconomic activity of the market. Ugbodaga-Ngu used expressionistic brushwork to depict four women: two seated and two standing. Adorned in veils, blouses, and dark wrappers of different colors, they are arranged in the foreground, set against the brown wall of a shop or stall. Chiaroscuro models and defines their bold forms. Ugbogada-Ngu successfully depicted the drapery of their veils and wrappers, the folds and textures of which are highlighted. Their activity, in turn, is suggested by their bowls—calabashes used for the storage of the milk and millet meal sold by Hausa/Fulani milkmaids in northern Nigerian markets. The depiction of these women engaged in work is offset by a group of three men in the distance who, presumably customers are walking toward them and the market. The contrasting portrayals of the men and women highlight the differing gender roles.

The sartorial details also date the activity. Given that the women use veils, as opposed to hijabs to cover themselves. Research reveals that the hijab was adopted in the late 1970s and 1980s as a result of cultural encounters and exchange with Arabs. ¹⁸ Thus, Ugbodaga-Ngu did not merely reflect on the economic activity of these women but their cultural attires in a likely scene from the 1960s.

 Beggars (1963) introduces a nuance in the construction of sociocultural identity among a group of people in northern Nigeria. This particular scene is dominated by a blue background, and three figures arranged in the center of the composition. They are dramatically highlighted with sharply contrasting light and shade. The figure on the left sports a cap while the center and right-hand figures are wearing hats. Their clothing is characteristic of that of mendicants in Hausa/Fulani culture. The men’s hats hint at cultural elements adopted to provide shade as their wearers move from street to street under the hot sun.

In her painting, Ugbogaga-Ngu draws attention to the history of mendacity among men, women, and children forced into vagrancy as a means of livelihood. Indeed, in an attempt to engage elements from indigenous African art, she depicts the three beggars engaged in the act of singing, a cultural practice of Muslim minstrels, who perform satiric operas as they go about begging. Given the fact that Ugbodaga-Ngu was a faculty member at the ABU, Zaria, she must have been witness to and influenced by these groups, as she reflected on modernity in Hausa society. Although the subject is mendicants, the painting does not depict begging as such, but rather the musical performance of oral beggar poets or almajirai. ¹⁹ These Hausa minstrels do not use musical instruments to accompany their street poetry.

A colorful or polychromatic portrayal of a woman adorned in a blue gele and buba, the cultural dress of the Yoruba, Palm Wine Seller (1963) features calabash motifs in the foreground, and as shadows in tones of green and yellow in the background. In front of the vendor, there are five intricately designed calabashes filled with palm wine. Ugbodaga-Ngu has portrayed the woman holding two of the vessels, attempting to present them to customers in front of her as is suggested by her upward gaze. Although the thematic thrust of this painting constructs the identity of an individual selling palm wine, its content draws attention to one of the economic activities of women in Yoruba culture: she is likely the wife of a tapper or a vendor whose trade is selling the beverage. Palm wine is a natural alcoholic drink produced from the fermented sap of various palm trees. Common throughout West Africa, it has social and cultural value in many rural and urban areas in southern Nigeria. Together with Market Women, this painting  highlights Ugbodaga-Ngu’s interest in depicting the various economic activities and roles of women in Nigeria in the 1960s—that is, their noble and industrious engagement in supporting their households.

Clara Ugbodaga-Ngu played numerous roles in advancing postcolonial modern art in Nigeria, becoming an inspiration not only to her students, but also to other Nigerian art teachers and artists. Even though she depicted figures in her work, in many instances, she moved away from a realistic figurative style, blending Western and Nigerian traditions, forms, techniques, and ideas to create fresh modernist work. Not only did she develop and excel at a representational style adopted by early modernist artists, she also contributed to portraying the lived experiences of men and women, drawing attention to aspects of modernity in Nigeria in the 1960s. Her compositions manifest the cultural dress associated with African identity and the cultural differences among people in northern and southern Nigeria. Her work communicates different thematic concerns that convey her thoughts on individual and Nigerian cultural identities, and social and cultural values among people in northern and southern Nigerian cultures.  

In reproducing the images contained in this text, the Museum obtained the permission of the rights holders, whenever possible. If the Museum could not locate the rights holders, notwithstanding good-faith efforts, it requests that any contact information concerning such rights holders be forwarded so that they may be contacted for future editions.

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Malika Agueznay, among the first woman modernist abstract artists in Morocco, was able to forge a space for herself within a predominately masculine environment by insisting on the presence of a gendered expression of modernity through her research into seaweed. She was a student at the École des Beaux-Arts of Casablanca from 1966 to 1970, during the tenure of the faculty associated with the experimental Casablanca School. While she was supported by her professors, as one of few women within the student body, Agueznay was able to create a new perspective arising from the embodiment of her own femininity.¹ Her work and viewpoints were shaped by the formative experience within the school, although she also distinguished herself in the ways in which her research emphasized her female identity. Agueznay was the only major female modernist artist linked to the École des Beaux-Arts at the time it was central to the debates around modernism in Morocco. Starting during her studies and expanding throughout her career, Agueznay elaborated on seaweed as a primary motif in her abstract practice. Drawing upon the influences of the Casablanca School, she engaged in abstraction that was deliberately evocative of femininity and of her own female perspective.

The École des Beaux-Arts was the locus of the Casablanca School, and Agueznay’s time as a student there coincided precisely with the movement’s brief heyday.² Directed by modernist artist Farid Belkahia (1934–2014) from 1964 to 1972, the institution became a critical space for modernist experimentation and practice. It had been founded in 1950 under the French protectorate, and its faculty in the 1960s and early 1970s, which included Mohamed Melehi (1936–2020) and Mohammed Chebaa (1935–2013), actively rejected the remnants of colonialism, including Eurocentric teaching methods. Instead, as part of their broader anti-colonial politics, the school’s professors rooted their pedagogy in local visual culture, using objects such as rugs and metalwork as models in the classroom and leading students on field trips around Morocco to document and study applied abstraction within mosques and other local spaces. The École des Beaux-Arts remains open in Casablanca and has trained many women artists since Agueznay. Though there were women on the faculty when the institution was integral to the development of Moroccan modernism, including influential art historian Toni Maraini (born 1941), many of the female students did not go on to have significant careers in the arts. Agueznay is the only major woman artist linked to the institution during this pivotal time.

One of the key moments in the history of the Casablanca School is the 1969 manifesto exhibition Présence plastique, which was held in Jemaa el-Fna in Marrakech. In protest to an official salon organized by the city’s ministry of culture, six male faculty members displayed their work in this public square over ten days to engage a broader audience in the debates around modernism.³ Agueznay and her classmates accompanied their professors to Marrakech, witnessing and participating in their conversations with the public. The Casablanca School artists followed up this exhibition later that same year with another public exhibition, this one in Casablanca in the Place du 16 Novembre. Similar to the presentation in Marrakech, their goal was to reach a broader audience by bringing art to a more public setting and to encourage conversation about it. Unlike in Marrakech, however, their students, including Agueznay, participated—though they did not stay with their work, because, as Agueznay remembers, they had to return class. Including the students in this undertaking was part of the broader system of collaboration that the faculty tried to promote. According to Agueznay, the relationship with her teachers “was very friendly. It wasn’t the teacher where you had to stand at attention, let him pass. Not at all—it was contestation. When we didn’t understand, they would help us understand. We discussed things. Once or twice a week, we would have round tables, where each artist would go with his students, and we would sit and talk. There were permanent discussions.” This sense of being part of an ongoing collaborative intellectual pursuit informed Agueznay’s interest in collective practice and abstraction. In 1978, alongside her former professors, she was a founding participant in the first edition of what would become the annual Cultural Moussem of Asilah. In 1981, with many of the same people, she was involved in a public art project within the Berrechid psychiatric hospital, where in collaboration with one of the patients, she produced a ten-meter-long mural. In 1985, she created a large-scale mural in Asilah as part of the festival. These collaborative forms of public engagement were influenced by the formative ideas of the Casablanca School.

Agueznay entered the École des Beaux-Arts at age twenty-four. She was slightly older than her fellow classmates and already a mother, which further set her apart. Although there were very few women students—only three in her memory within the painting studio when she began—she felt supported by the faculty and other students, and was not only treated kindly and respectfully but also no differently. When pressed, Agueznay described some backlash once she had left the school and begun to maintain, as a woman artist, a modernist abstract practice. (“En tout cas, j’ai reçu des coups de bâton pour ça!”⁴) While still a student, she insisted on creating a place for herself as a mother and artist, bringing her young child, Amina, with her on days she did not have childcare. As the institution was relatively small, Amina was able to sit in the corner, where she would play with clay provided by one of the professors. Agueznay remembers Belkahia raising his eyebrows at Amina’s presence each Wednesday, but Agueznay insisted that she could either come with her child or not come at all. She had a second baby while still a student, and so then both children accompanied her on field trips; she, in fact, attended Présence plastique with her newborn. Similarly, her children always joined her in Asilah, as they would be on school vacation during that time. Agueznay describes the collective effort of the festival, with the participation of whole families. Children would have drawing lessons or take part in artist-led workshops. When pressed about the challenges of balancing her practice and her role as primary caregiver, she deflected: “It was the only solution. . . . It was like when the artists got to the school, the most essential thing was art and research. . . . We all [the whole family] participated in the creation of the festival.” Agueznay created a space for herself as a mother and artist at a time when the possibility of maintaining both identities was a crucial aspect of the second wave feminist investigation. In her “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” (1969), for example, Mierle Laderman Ukeles (born 1939), specifically argues against the patriarchal American art system that deemed she could not be both a mother and an artist, and embodied that in different “maintenance” works. Similarly, in 1973, the collective Mother Art created a playground for the Feminist Studio Workshop in Los Angeles, making their children’s inclusion in art spaces part of their work. The presence of Agueznay’s children was not performative, but rather the result of necessity. She created this space for herself, though, at a time when there were no other female modernist artists in Morocco and when, in other parts of the world, artists were actively confronting what seemed to be a double bind.  

Agueznay’s practice can be seen structurally through the lens of feminist analysis, including in the groundbreaking way that she navigated her career as an artist and her role as a mother. Within the work itself, which consistently features the motif of seaweed, she also elaborated what she considered to be a specifically female form of abstraction. Recalling, perhaps, the marine plants and algae she would find as a child in summers on the coast, the motif in practice is not figurative. Far from being determined by mathematical systems, these organic shapes are formed instead by instinct, then further built up by the inclusion of texture, whether through cut wood, thickly applied ink, or sand within the paint. The abstraction thereby becomes rooted in the body, guided by feelings and the senses. Agueznay has linked the seaweed to the female form, and saw the rounded shapes, when she first developed them, as only possible from a female artist. Unlike the hard edges of the geometrical abstractions produced by other students, these rounded twisting shapes were, for her, rooted in her own female identity. Within an overwhelmingly masculine context, both at the École des Beaux-Arts and within the broader art scene in Morocco, Agueznay’s deliberate evocation of female identity and female form can be read as a concrete claim for female presence in what was a male-dominated field.

Over time, Agueznay has incorporated the seaweed form in different ways, in effect, pulling it in different directions: as pure abstraction, as the foundation for calligraphic text, as part of a distinct plant formation, or as a specific evocation of the female body. She has also used it across mediums, placing it at the center of her multifaceted practice, which has extended from printmaking and painting to sculpture and woodwork. She first used the motif in the monumental group of painted wooden panels she showed at the 1968 student exhibition. The six panels together measure 305 by 440 centimeters (approximately 10 by 14 1/2 feet), much larger than human scale. In the center of the grouping, there are two diamonds stacked vertically, the smaller one on top of the larger one. They connect organically, with the same seaweed contracting at the meeting point and continuing to expand into the lower shape. The background is sky blue, with the central diamonds in bright orange and the remaining seaweed a deeper marine blue. The whole work is covered in seaweed, and the central shape is thereby distinguished through the use of color; while there are distinct diamonds, there are no hard edges delineating them. The diamonds evoke the curves of a woman’s body. In its use of a singular sign that dominates the panels, the project seems equally influenced by imagery culled from rugs or jewelry. Indeed, the faculty insisted that students undertake rigorous research into forms rooted in local visual culture. The seaweed began from a formal interest. Struggling to find a theme for her final project, Agueznay was encouraged by Melehi to “do your lines,” and it was through visual experimentation that she settled on seaweed. Melehi himself, over the course of a career lasting almost sixty years, maintained a central interest in the motif of the wave, which he then used in various configurations and toward different ends. In the repetition over the span of her career of a central abstract motif, and in some ways the shared oceanic theme, Agueznay is clearly linked to Melehi, who encouraged her to stay with this project. However, there are obvious distinctions within their artistic endeavors. Melehi’s hard-edge waves are often in dialogue with science and cybernetics, and his abstractions seem to function as precise systems separate from human intervention. In contrast to Melehi’s coolly analytic abstraction, the organic shape of Agueznay’s seaweed seems lawless, growing upon itself in a generative abstraction. Built up with materials that add dimension, either through mixed-media application or the inclusion of sand in the paint, Agueznay’s work is also tactile. Her individual touch is always present. Agueznay pulled motifs, forms, and topics from the Casablanca School, while at the same time, carving out her own formal path and insisting on a female presence within a broader, predominantly masculine landscape.

Many of these ideas have coalesced in the importance of printmaking in Agueznay’s practice. She began printmaking in the first edition of Asilah Moussem in the workshop of Roman Artymowski (1919–1993), and went on to study in New York in the workshops of Mohammad Omar Khalil (born 1936) and Robert Blackburn (1920–2003).⁵ She continued to explore printmaking in Asilah with Khalil, Blackburn, and Krishna Reddy (1925–2018), exhibiting her prints in group exhibitions there starting in 1979. She began leading this same workshop when Khalil left. Agueznay was the first woman printmaker in Morocco. Like in the rest of her practice, her prints primarily emphasize the seaweed motif and are built up to have different layers of texture. The physicality of the printmaking process has also been important to her, as she has strived to maintain her own touch and presence within this medium. Collaboration has likewise been central to this part of her practice, both in terms of her own education in different workshops and in the annual workshops she led in Asilah for over twenty years. More broadly, in becoming Morocco’s first woman printmaker and then incorporating printmaking as one part of her multidisciplinary practice, Agueznay has created a space for herself as an artist outside the boundaries of media and gender.

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Medu Art Ensemble, a collective formed in 1978 in Gaborone, Botswana (in Sesotho, “medu” means “roots”), was “comprised of more than 60 visual artists, performers and writers, mainly South African exiles but with members from Botswana, Canada, Cuba, Sweden and North America.”¹ One of Medu’s notable legacies was organizing the Culture and Resistance Symposium and Festival of the Artsheld at the University of Botswana in Gaborone in 1982. More than nine hundred people from Europe, the United States, and Southern Africa attended.² The purpose of the symposium was to chart a way forward for the role of arts and culture in a new and free democratic South Africa. Medu was active from 1979 until June 14, 1985, when the South African Defence Force (SADF) launched a cross-border raid on African National Congress (ANC) targets in Gaborone, including several Medu members. Medu disbanded after the raid.

The collective consisted of six units: Publications and Research, Graphic Arts and Design, Music, Theatre, Photography, and Film. Apart from its focus on promoting resistance to apartheid in South Africa, Medu was active in training Botswana nationals and exiles as well as conducting workshops in various art disciplines and hosting live music and theatre events. Its “members adopted the appellation ‘cultural workers,’ choosing not to identify as artists because of the shared belief that as culture was of the people, it could not and should not be confined to the exclusionary art world of the apartheid era.”³ This idea is best expressed by Thami Mnyele (1948–1985), a Medu member and visual artist: “For me as craftsman, the act of creating art should complement he act of creating shelter for my family or liberating the country for my people. This is culture.”⁴ Medu drew inspiration from a variety of creative ideas and role models, including West Indian social philosopher Frantz Fanon and African writers such as Wole Soyinka and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, but also from more broadly categorized revolutionary thought and artists such as Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, German playwright Bertolt Brecht, and Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Orozco, and David Siqueiros, and painter Frida Kahlo.⁵

Key members of the Graphic Arts and Design unit during different periods were Sergio-Albio González (Cuban, born 1931; active in Medu 1979–85), Phillip Segola (South African, born 1948), Miles Pelo (South African, date of birth unknown; active in Medu 1979–83), Judy Seidman (American, born 1951; active in Medu 1981–85), Thami Mnyele (South African, 1948–1985; active in Medu 1979–85), Heinz Klug (South African, born 1957; active in Medu 1979–85), Gordon Metz (South African, born 1955; active in Medu 1979–85), Lentswe Eric Mokgatle (South African, date of birth unknown; active in Medu 1982–85), Petra Röhr-Rouendaal (German, date of birth unknown; dates active in Medu unknown), Basil Jones (South African, date of birth unknown; active in Medu 1979–81), and Adrian Köhler (South African, born 1951; active in Medu 1978–80).⁶ The unit designed and produced posters, covers, and illustrations for Medu’s newsletters and pamphlets. Decisions on artwork designs were made collectively and at times themes were commissioned by a general meeting of Medu members.⁷ Members of the unit established a set of guiding principles for the production of artwork designs, including that the message of the art stem from the community and not be a result of individual artistic genius, that each formal and aesthetic component of the work contribute to the message, and that the art should elicit a response from the audience based upon their own history and experience.⁸ Medu’s posters have become icons of the liberation movement and more recently acknowledged for their aesthetic contribution within a larger canon of artistic creation.⁹ Between 1979 and 1985, the unit produced approximately ninety posters that were smuggled into South Africa.

The graphic poster You Have Struck a Rock (1981), in MoMA’s collection, was produced to commemorate the Women’s Anti-Pass March of August 9, 1956 (now commemorated annually on August 9 in post-apartheid South Africa as Women’s Day). The march was organized by the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) and led by Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Albertina Sisulu, and Sophia Williams-De Bruyn.¹⁰ The apartheid government had proposed amendments to the “pass” laws that would further restrict the movement of Black women and require them to carry a document that regulated their movement and hours of transit. Twenty thousand women of all races marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to submit a petition in protest. J. G. Strijdom, then prime minister, refused to accept their petition. The women responded with the song “Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo” (“You strike the women, you strike a rock”), which has come to symbolize the courage and strength of South African women. According to the ANC,  the emancipation of women must be an integral part of national liberation. In response, at a monthly Medu meeting, it was decided that a poster be produced to commemorate the women’s march.

As a member of the Graphic Arts and Design unit, Judy Seidman, an American-born artist and activist who moved to Gaborone in 1980, proposed an ink drawing of a woman holding an AK-47 and the full text “You have touched a woman, you have struck a rock; you have dislodged a boulder, you will be crushed.” It was decided to replace the AK-47 with a clenched fist and a broken chain. This change was made due to concerns that Medu needed to be cautious about portraying support for the armed struggle and thereby creating problems for the Botswana authorities, who had to be diplomatic with regard to its neighbor South Africa and apartheid. The resulting poster, You Have Struck a Rock (1981), was produced as a silkscreen using a cut-knife stencil and a single pull process to generate approximately 200 copies.¹¹ You Have Struck a Rock (1981) has become an iconic symbol for women’s liberation and, in particular, the conviction and courage of Black women.

You Have Struck a Rock (1981) portrays an African image of solidarity against oppression that evokes a poster created in 1942 by J. Howard Miller (American, 1918–2004) titled We Can Do It! but later associated with Rosie the Riveter, an American feminist icon. Used as part of a campaign to recruit woman workers during World War II, the American poster became a symbol for women’s independence and equal rights. In a similar way, You Have Struck a Rock (1981) can be understood to function as a metonym for women’s rights and liberation against oppression. While stylistically the two images differ, with We Can Do It! embodying what would come to be seen as a Pop aesthetic, while You Have Struck a Rock (1981) reveals a cut-and-paste montage aesthetic, both posters pivot off the notion of an individual woman at the center of historical events and, therefore, shaping the course of history. In this way, there is a productive tension between the propaganda message of the poster medium linked to a collective social idea and the notion of the individual artistic identity behind the image. This tension is apparent in Medu as a collective formed around the idea of solidarity, utilizing the arts to stand against oppression, and yet comprised of individual artists and activists who have left an indelible mark on history.

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Dina: Hi, Bing, and all, thanks for kick-starting this process. It is always good to start the year with collective thinking and reflection. My name is Syafiatudina, or Dina for short. I work as a translator, organizer, and curator in Yogyakarta. I became part of KUNCI in 2009. I have been keeping myself and others busy thinking about institutional practices, social movements, collectivity, and critical pedagogy. I am also finishing my studies in the MA Curatorial Practice program at the University of Bergen with a project and thesis on listening as a political act and the intersection between curatorial and organizing practices. I love cats, dogs, and fashion. I do karaoke by myself regularly to create a space for doing and thinking otherwise.

Ferdi: My name is Ferdi. I dabble in different types of work, mainly in the cultural field, including teaching, writing, giving workshops, researching, and translating—sometimes doing some of them at the same time in order to get by. My top two favorite things to do are sleep and procrastinate. I also deeply enjoy cooking, though I’m not the best of cooks. What gets me going is thinking and doing things together with others, although I am usually the first to be wrecked when this collective mode of working breaks down. My primal astrology animal is a kangaroo, and my spirit animal is a horse. I like the second one better.   

Nuning: My name is Nuraini Juliastuti, or Nuning for short. I am a writer and researcher, mainly around arts organization, activism, illegality, and alternative cultural production. Apart from deeply hanging out intellectually and non-intellectually with my KUNCI fellows, my husband and I run Reading Sideways Press, which is a small press we developed to publish works and translations on arts, sports, and literature. In 2020, I joined Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis and began work on a postdoctoral fellowship titled “Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation.” Writing is the main outcome of my practice, though thinking with clarity feels like a challenge at times. Writing satisfies my personal urges to theorize about things and events that have shaped me. These range from big things to small things—such as drawing and baking with my daughter, to looking at flowers on the street. Looking forward to the conversation!

Bing: Hi everyone! I’m Bing. I think laughing and eating well are of utmost importance. I like to write, read, and have engaging conversations. I appreciate honesty and idiosyncrasy, and am eternally devoted to fashion and K-pop. My practice facilitates creative assemblages of art, writing, ideas, and contexts. Currently, this takes the form of publications and programs.

I think a good place to start this conversation is with the School of Improper Education (SoIE), which KUNCI founded in 2016. The school’s open call states that “the meaning of authority in knowledge production will be scrutinized.” Learning (and more importantly unlearning) is done collectively and without predetermined outcomes like a grade, ranking, or certificate. In SoIE, a teacher becomes a student, and vice versa. Effort is made to do away with the presumed hierarchy or superiority of any particular figure or subject matter. This led me to think of [Jacques] Rancière (a significant reference point for all of us here), who once said that one should never “presuppose the imbecility of the viewer.”¹ SoIE is, therefore, in my understanding, characterized by contingency and embodied process. I understand, for example, that in the past, you’ve learned sign language together. What are some interesting “classes” that you’ve taken part in over the years? Have there been moments when there was a breakdown or dispute in the communication/transmission of knowledge, and what did you learn from that experience?

Dina: I have been thinking more and more about the School of Improper Education, especially since the pandemic started, and I get more energized whenever I remember interesting SoIE “classes” or moments—for example, our very first meetings, when we arrived at the decision to learn sign language. One of these lasted for three hours, although initially we agreed to finish in one and a half or two hours. I remember that we started from the shared position of not knowing. Not knowing what we can do together. Not knowing what each person wants from school and beyond. But we kept talking and listening to each other. We wrote a lot down on Post-it notes. We insisted on making connections between words, concepts, and people. Finally, we collectively decided to learn sign language. It felt great. It felt like we were operating as one big, collective brain.

Here is my note from that meeting, but unfortunately it’s in Bahasa Indonesia.

Maybe other people have different memories of interesting SoIE classes or moments? Regarding moments of breakdown, maybe it’s more about moments of breaking down. Like what we are experiencing now during the pandemic. I feel like the physical distancing made it difficult for the school to operate, because we relied a lot on gathering and doing things together in the same place at the same time. Perhaps we need to figure out how to better use the digital space for this purpose? Maybe. But personally, I often feel screen fatigue from working too much on the computer.

Ferdi: I have difficulty responding to the question, as I haven’t been there myself when this has happened (or, actually, since the school was founded). So I can only share my impressions of things that I saw unfolding, through the many traces of the school on our blog and via other means of publication, and our conversations on WhatsApp and video calls. I remember that in the beginning, the atmosphere was kind of “sticky” with apprehension. A weird thing to say considering that all of this, for me, was experienced virtually—rather than physically in terms of sharing the space with others in Yogyakarta. I think this was because the idea of “not knowing” also applied to us as the school’s organizers. Despite the fact that we had already read Rancière’s text, we did not feel more prepared per se. Not only were we not quite sure how to hold space for the students to explore “not-knowingness,” we did not necessarily know how to respond to the simplest questions—such as, “What is it that we are trying to do?” This is not to say that we did nothing when faced with this difficult question. As Dina already explained, the collective decision to learn sign language shows our generosity toward each other. It was a way of relinquishing the power of knowledge from its holder. We realized that no one was in the know, and tried to hold onto that feeling and continue together.

I guess the moments of breakdown are interwoven through all of this: the excitement when things finally seemed to be going somewhere; the disappointment upon realizing that this “somewhere” was not really “anywhere” (what is it about knowledge that is so territorial?); the tenacity of holding onto speculation and attending to uncertainties as modes of studying; the relief that while things continued to simmer, they never ended up spilling over.

Mind you, this was in the very early stages of the school. There is a stark contrast to what came up later on, when existing power structures (privilege and lack of privilege) emerged as a springboard in our thinking about how and what knowledge can be produced. Not knowing and the accompanying tensions seem to lose their urgency when we turn the school inside out and look toward working with communities.

Nuning: I always need to remind myself that the idea of the school emerged from our wholehearted intention to navigate the unknown areas and feelings that we experienced nineteen years after KUNCI was born, and twenty years after Reformasi. Embracing the unknown has been key to our work since the beginning. In light of this, learning sign language—in conjunction with reading Rancière’s text on [Joseph] Jacotot—seemed very apt. Apart from the idea of speculating regarding the uncertainties that Ferdi mentioned, there is also humility and resilience in our invitation to take up uncertainties, and maximize them as avenues to keep on moving and living. My personal reflection on the school also points to another matter: KUNCI’s habit, or tactical device, of nurturing space for experimentation. In our recent collaborative writing for Ugly Duckling Presse’s pamphlet series, we likened the idea of the school to slowness, but it’s the kind of slowness that is infused with an atmosphere of “radical patience.” Since 1999, we have changed how we describe ourselves at least three times. In the latest rendition, the concept of “vernacular education” is transformed into “collectivizing study.” Our main idea remains that we are always driven to deflate education and eschew the professionalization of intellectual thought. 

When I read the many notes, essays, and poems written by the school’s participants, in preparation to write an introduction for the school report book (published by KUNCI in 2019), I got the impression that learning sign language was like a shock device. In the participants’ attempts to embrace the invitation to engage with uncertainties (through joining the school), learning sign language created productive opportunities to articulate what uncertainty means and to explore the usefulness of having such a “blurry” space as the School of Improper Education. Like Ferdi, I am also part of KUNCI’s diaspora, forced to disengage from physical presence as the main medium for communication. I do not take for granted the opportunity to write an essay reflecting on other people’s reflections about the school.

I think an interesting phase of the school was when we practiced the “Turba” (Turun ke Bawah) method.² My observation, based on the participants’ notes, was that the Turba method provided an opportunity to reflect on what “under” means in relation to studying practices. Turba emerged as a kind of visitation mode, which led to learning about diverse ways of living in unfamiliar contexts. It pointed to the meaning of “community” (always a valuable concept) and the possibility of a new way of living.

Bing: In your responses, you’ve touched on ideas and practices that are central to KUNCI: togetherness, community, and collectivity. I recall reading a published conversation between members of KUNCI, The Showroom (London), and Casco (Utrecht) about the informal, affective, and intangible notions of KUNCI’s collective organization—such as friendship, hanging out, porous involvement/membership, and the necessity of domestic work like buying toilet paper (which the text was titled after!).³ What do you think is unique or particular about KUNCI’s collectivity in Yogyakarta, or even Indonesia, and how does this translate (or not) to other international contexts? (For example, in KUNCI’s recent projects abroad in Hong Kong or Kampala) 

Ferdi: Another good question that is not so easy to answer. It’s hard for me to articulate this “uniqueness” because 1) I am too deep in the experience, making it quite hard to put it into words, and 2) I don’t know how to say it without sounding too full of myself. Maybe I can highlight one particular moment. It was during our twentieth anniversary in August 2019. We had a bit of a party, or selametan in the Javanese tradition, where we invited close friends and community members for a meal and celebration. The theme of that event was 20 tahun KUNCI: Sama-sama belajar, belajar sama sama (a play on words that roughly translates as “20 years of KUNCI: Together studying, studying together”).

There was a brief moment before dinner when we invited all of the guests to form a big circle in our yard and to share their impressions or reflect together with us about the years that have passed. One of our new members, Rifky Akbar Pratama, or AP, gave a short speech about how he felt being the “fresh blood” in the collective. I was so astounded by the speech, I asked him to send the script to the rest of us. Entitled “As Far as I Know,” it conjured a poignant image of what our collective can become. I quote a part of it here (with the hope that my English translation will do justice to the original text’s poetics): 

“I chose authenticity of experience as a key term, because as far as I know, that’s what sets KUNCI apart from other organizations. Something that, as far as I can tell, makes comparisons unreliable. After all, can’t idiosyncrasy or uniqueness only be measured against itself? As far as I know, the authenticity of experience is very close to the term rasa (feelings)—something that is easier to practice than to theorize about. It opens up the possibility for us to ask, “Is it possible to use feelings as the starting point for knowledge?” It opens up the possibility to pause, and to not rush toward rationalization. As far as I know, folks who are so afraid to show such feelings and raw emotions often hide behind intellectualization—or “defense mechanisms,” as they are called in psychology. These people have difficulty accepting openness, vulnerability, and also love, because they are too dependent on their head’s contents. As far as I know, KUNCI’s not like that. As far as I know, it is open and not forceful, and yet it is faithful to keeping secrets. It opens its hands to my generation, which tends to avoid fixation on the greatness of the past and refuses to bear shame for past failures. KUNCI, as far as I know, makes manifest Uncle Mao’s teaching, “A master who is too strict has no disciples; water which is too pure has no fish.”

Nuning: The question about uniqueness always forces us to think about what shapes us from the inside as well as from the outside. In the beginning, KUNCI was established as a space for cultural studies. We realized that what we are actually doing is escaping from the limitations and prior understandings of what “cultural studies” means. We appropriate the established meaning of cultural studies, and at the same time, seek to build our own ways to be “amateur intellectuals” (as Edward Said posited in Representations of the Intellectual, 1996).⁴ By “amateur intellectuals,” I mean we move freely in and out of formal institutions. This flexible positionality gives us a certain kind of freedom to avoid fixations (back to AP’s poem, which Ferdi mentioned) and, in our case, to avoid professionalization. We don’t want to specialize in a certain field; rather, we want to have faith in what we deem valuable. 

Bing: I really appreciate KUNCI’s epistemic humility and sensitivity. To pick up on the point about “fresh blood,” how has it been to organize and think together with the younger generation? And as a somewhat paradoxical follow-up question to my earlier query on particularity, are there any projects, collectives, artists (in any field) you feel resonate with KUNCI? 

Dina: I think humility is an important idea to raise here. Humility is an important position that we take when we work with and relate to others. Regardless of organizational age (who has been with the organization since the beginning, middle, or more recently), everyone arrives with their own experience and expertise. So it’s important to listen and “walk together.” This comes from the Zapatista principle of preguntando caminamos, or “walking as we ask questions.”

It’s important to always have assumptions checked, and to have intentions shared and clarified. Can the collective support each member’s personal quest in life and practice? In what ways do we not provide this support, and therefore need to respect each other’s personal space? This process requires a lot of conversation, and as a collective with members from different walks of life, places, and even time zones, sometimes we feel out of touch with others. But that’s also okay because there is an implicit trust that we can always talk whenever it is needed. Although this trust needs to be maintained too.

With regards to generational difference, there were some discussions that emerged (in KUNCI and other forums) on how certain issues, such as precariousness, privilege, or mental health, are more actively raised by the younger generation. Rather than pegging these issues as the concerns of one age group, I guess it is more fruitful to use them as an entry point to comparing material conditions in different time periods, and to see what has changed and what remains. So intergenerational dialogue needs to be maintained in order to study forms of togetherness together.

On projects, collectives, and artists that I feel have resonated with KUNCI—actually, there are a lot. Partly because I feel that, in KUNCI, we want to nurture relations. The framework of being a “vanguard,” which I find a lot in the arts, is dangerous. I feel that we are indebted to the people who came before us, who are here with us now, and who are yet to come. Being in the Arts Collaboratory network has put us in touch with groups of shared affinity. I learn from groups who also do collective study, such as Read-in, or self-publishing initiatives like Taller Producción Editorial, Display Distribute, Kerjasama59, Zine-ah!, and libraries like C20 library & collabtive, Kineruku. Another organization that resonates with KUNCI is dislocate. These groups and initiatives have shown how collective publishing, studying, and organizing are entangled while constantly having various feet (not just two) in different disciplines and sociopolitical movements. I think there are many unnamed communities with important practices that resonate with ours, like reading circles among workers (including migrant workers in Taipei and Hong Kong), groups who are fighting for their land rights and rights to live, student presses, and many more. If I list all of them, this text will look like a shout-out section in an album.

Ferdi: There are also a lot of groups, artists collectives, and organizations around the world that have initiated school(-ish) initiatives that I find fascinating, like Ahmet Öğüt’s The Silent University, Al Maeishah, which is an itinerant communal-learning platform, and Gudskul, which is co-initiated by ruangrupa in Jakarta. There are also those I see as our epistemic allies, such as Crater Invertido in Mexico City and Casco Art Institute in Utrecht. Long-term collaborations by the likes of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten and Raqs Media Collective, 16 Beaver group artist-run initiative in New York, and the bygone Dutch queer collective Strange Fruit have also become sources of inspiration. 

With regards to generational differences, I think it is an important (tacit) policy of ours not to shove them under the proverbial carpet. As a matter of fact, this also applies to other differences based on gender, sexual orientation, religion, class, ethnicity, race, and ability. I think we try to constantly engage with these issues through what Denise Ferreira da Silva terms “difference without separability,”⁵ that is, a sociality, or mode of coexistence that moves away from the grip of Cartesian determinacy. It invites us to think through what brings us together and what can we do with these diverse (be-)longings, while at the same time acknowledging that what sets us apart never fully defines who each of us is. 

This proposition also helps us to think in terms of the time that we have together now as all of the time any of us has left. This may differ according to the different chronological age of each KUNCI member. But this notion of ongoing urgency has helped us in turning our past personal baggage (achievements and failures as AP described it in his poetic speech, and I would add, joy and trauma), present struggles, and future uncertainties into a means of intimating collective well-being.

Bing: The idea of epistemological humility has recurred in our conversation. At this point, I think it is important to note that KUNCI does not fetishize the nostalgia of openness, but rather addresses the particular conditions and difficulties of interpersonal relations. In our ongoing experience of the pandemic, the language of “care,” “intimacy,” and “solidarity” has been mobilized, for better or worse, with increasing frequency. It is also interesting to see who is now taking up that type of discourse—but that is another matter. What is your view on a mode of “collectivity,” or “being together,” that might have an inconsistent application in real life? How might one check the privilege of rhetoric?

Nuning: I am growing older with KUNCI, bringing along all my moments of happiness, disappointment, anger, anxiety, and desperation, all the while holding onto hope. Among ourselves, there have been many discussions where we try to define what it means to be together as KUNCI. I like to think about a collectivity that has different shapes—that of friendship, a dysfunctional family, a gang, or maybe even a patch of wild grass. Why are we together? The answers can be so diverse: to expand the scope of our intellectual camaraderie, to be the intellectual and trivial salient support system, to nurture my/our sense of disobedience in times of uncertainty. “Growing older with” can be used as a perspective to view the politics of generational relations in the organization. “Fresh blood” is not just the younger generation, but allies, and friends who I actively look out for. It allows me to regard KUNCI as a lived/embodied experience that is open as a site to theorize or to make abstraction from personal experience. I think the inconsistent applications of “collectivity” and “being together” might happen when an individual/organization using these concepts can’t answer why and how they would use them. Being honest and genuine is the key to knowledge. If we can do that, we can be abstract and concrete at the same time. It takes practice to be able to do that—a certain kind of practice where we need to persevere in the face of temptation from various acts of validation. Collectivity is collectivity, being together is being together. But we need to remember that neither can be easily formalized. They can also mean and be known as different things altogether. 

Dina and Ferdi already mentioned a number of independent organizations that I also like. Recently I have been observing the works of The Black School (New York), The Feminist Memory Project by Nepal Picture Library (Kathmandu), Pathshala South Asian Media Institute (Dhaka). I also like following the works of Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance and Aboriginal Tent Embassy. 

I feel that your previous question about “working and thinking together with the younger generation” closely relates to the next question about the discourse and application of “collectivity” and “being together.” It makes me think about the history of youth in Indonesia, and how it always follows the generational timeline. Each generation is imagined to contribute something to that history. The members of KUNCI have their own needs, and these needs serve as a guide to our future. As we are becoming together, we learn that these needs are rooted in our histories. This should be emphasized because we might not get this character in other modes of collectivity. On the other hand, it is dangerous to frame everything in terms of “collectivity” and “being together.” We don’t need to wait until certain concepts or categorizations pop up to define what we feel or think about ourselves. Instead, I’d like to propose apprehension as a tool to check the privilege of one’s rhetoric. We are rich enough with histories to produce our own keywords, words that enable us to critically review our condition.

Ferdi: I hope that what we have been telling you so far about being together, collectivity, etc. does not come across as too fuzzy-wuzzy, because these ideas are not only crafted through time and labor but also built upon tensions and conflict. I often think about what terms and discourse have been left untouched by colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist structures. The limits of this rhetoric lie in the experience: while somehow throughout the years we have been able to hone the capacity to red-flag hogwash, often we don’t allow this intuition to stop us from saying yes, for example, to an invitation to collaborate (though it also really depends if we have the energy to do so or not). I am thinking now about hospitality as a form of hospice-ing, about engaging with unethical and unsustainable practices (what you call “rhetorical”?) toward enabling the dissolution of these very practices. 

Bing: What a beautiful cake! I was planning on visiting Jogja for KUNCI’s 20th anniversary after Ferdi mentioned it to me, but sadly the timing didn’t work out.

I don’t think KUNCI is “fuzzy-wuzzy” at all, or if it is, only in the best possible way! I appreciate your mentions of “apprehension” and “hospice-ing,” because I think they underscore KUNCI’s willingness to go through the process of collaboration, and emerge with an understanding of the difficulties, insecurities, and complicit actions that possibly come along with that collaboration. The suggestion (from Nuning, Gita, and Dina) to have a conversation rather than do an interview for post already speaks to KUNCI’s admirable self-reflexivity in that regard.

This might be a sudden pivot, but your most recent set of responses makes me think of the time when someone told me that a job interview and a date are totally different and cannot be compared. I would beg to differ. I feel like all work, especially cultural work, is about personal appraisal. Or, put otherwise, being a blank canvas or an empty vessel are luxuries that not everyone can afford. Yes, working or being together can build trust and political solidarity, but the intimacy of that process can also be leveraged and manipulated to nefarious ends. I don’t mean to sound morbid—only respectful of the resilience and time it takes to develop a fortified practice like KUNCI’s! 

Nuning: We had a two-day meeting (deep hanging-out sessions) last week to talk about what we should do next. On the first day, we divided ourselves into four groups of three to four persons each. In these “triangle” and “square” meetings, each of us talked about our struggles with matters of personal importance. Dina, AP, and I were in the same group. The need to do something together is as real as the need to be left alone and have personal, autonomous space. I noted down the following sentences:

• “KUNCI, which serves as the anchor and the room to play”
• “the need for activities that function both as a playground and space of companionship”
• “The need for articulation and documentation/documenting ourselves”
• “resonansi metode,” or methods that resonate (with others)
• publishing as a friend
• grounded intellectuals/tentacular scholars (scholars with many footings), and
• cross-territories translation.

There was also a conversation about the (collective) ghost of the present and the future, which emerges in the form of family and personal struggles. At the end of Day 2, we spent time thinking through keywords/findings generated in Day 1. We came up with a clearer way to think about KUNCI/ourselves through the words “Study” and “Forum” attached in our current definition. Studying and collective tooling emerged as two layers of our intellectual collective works. I feel like I am not really providing a final comment here. I am only presenting the main takeaway, or what really stays with me after the KUNCI meeting. I thought that this resonated with our current conversation. 

Ferdi: I just want to say how I always appreciate having these conversational moments with friends like you, Bing. While articulating, naming, and defining our experiences and practices as a collective is not easy to do, being in conversation with folks like you and others who do not just bombard us with ready-made questions, but rather really listen and make use of these moments as a means to build knowledge together, is precious. Personally, every time this kind of conversation takes place, it’s compelling to see how past understandings and ongoing events gain new meanings through different encounters and forms of interlocutions. Sharing a story becomes an event in itself, and experiences are not just being conveyed and represented but also created. Speaking with the collective “hat” back on, for us, a conversation such as this one is an important tool in reconfiguring ourselves, again and again.

Dina: To me, this deep conversation serves as a reminder of why we are here today, and it invokes a nostalgia for things that are not yet here but perhaps already there in the future. I am grateful to share it with Ferdi, Nuning, and you, Bing. Actually, while we were editing this text (up to March 2021), we were still in the middle of our annual meeting to talk about what should be done next—referring to Nuning’s notes of reflection above. In other organizations, annual meetings like this are usually held at the beginning of the year. After having five “annual” meetings this year alone, I made a joke that KUNCI’s so-called annual meeting might last for the rest of the year! The joke is funnier in Bahasa Indonesia. But I share it here anyway to show our endurance, persistence, and apprehension while dealing with complexity. I hope that the others who read this will find their strengths too.

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