Celebrating Ladi Kwali
Today’s Doodle celebrates Nigerian potter, ceramicist, and educator Ladi Kwali, who helped show the world the beauty of Nigerian art through intricately decorated earthenware designs. On this day in 2017, an exhibition of Ladi Kwali’s work at the Skoto Gallery opened.

Ladi Kwali was born in the village of Kwali in the Gwari region of Northern Nigeria, where pottery was an indigenous occupation among women. She learned to make pottemry as a child by her aunt using the traditional method of coiling. She made large pots for use as water jars, cooking pots, bowls, and flasks from coils of clay, beaten from the inside with a flat wooden paddle. They were decorated with incised geometric and stylized figurative patterns, including scorpions, lizards, crocodiles, chameleons, snakes, birds, and fish. She would impress patterns on top of the figures by rolling small roulettes of twisted string or notched wood over the surface of the clay, sometimes as horizontal banding and sometimes in vertical panels. The wooden roulettes consisted of small cylinders of hard wood, two or three inches long and a half-inch in diameter, notched with straight, oblique, or parallel patterns. The earthenware vessels and decorative techniques have been dated back to neolithic period. Following the region's traditional method, they were fired in a bonfire of dry vegetation. Her pots were noted for their beauty of form and decoration, and she was recognized regionally as a gifted and eminent potter. Several were acquired by the Emir of Abuja, Alhaji Suleiman Barau, in whose home they were seen by Michael Cardew in 1950.

Her achievements includes the fact that:
In 1954, Kwali 's pots were featured in the International exhibition of Abuja pottery organized by Michael Cardew.

Kwali was awarded an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) in 1963.

In 1977, she was awarded an honorary doctoral degree from Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria.

In 1980, the Nigerian Government (from the Cabinet Office of the Federal Republic of Nigeria) invested on her with the insignia of the Nigerian National Order of Merit Award (NNOM), the highest national honor for academic achievement.

She also received the national honor of the Officer of the Order of the Niger (OON) in 1981.

Her picture appears at the back of the Nigerian N20 Naira bill.

A major street in Abuja is called Ladi Kwali Road.

The Sheraton Hotel houses the Ladi Kwali Convention Center, which is one of the largest conference facilities in Abuja, consisting of ten meeting rooms and four ballrooms.

Her works are held in collection all around the world, such as Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, USA, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Aberystwyth University Ceramics Gallery, UK

The 2022 exhibition at Two Temple Place Body Vessel Clay, Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art included Kwali as the starting point for charting 70 years of ceramics by black women artists.

The Google Doodle for March 16 2022 was in honor of Ladi Kwali.

Our collective intellect as a nation made us the Giant of Africa

That's incredible