This year, the ART X Schools' Programme—conceived with multidisciplinary artist and art educator Tolulope Ami‑Williams—takes its cue from Ladi Kwali, the pioneering Nigerian potter whose portrait appears on the ₦20 note. Rooted in the Gbagyi tradition of hand‑built vessels, Kwali later embraced wheel‑throwing, glazing, and high‑temperature firing at the Abuja Pottery Training Centre, creating works that move between tradition and modernity, craft and art. Her practice echoes the Natural Synthesis championed by Uche Okeke and the Zaria Art Society: bringing Indigenous knowledge into dialogue with new methods to create contemporary forms.
Across five schools, around 200 students discover how Kwali turned everyday vessels into carriers of identity, memory, and imagination. Rather than copying her motifs, they look at their own surroundings: which animals, places, and symbols represent their lives today, and what would they want the future to remember? Using geometric forms, they design their own imagery and build it in colored thread onto papier‑mâché vessels.
An inter‑school competition asks: what can an object say? Inspired by Kwali and by contemporary practices such as Ndidi Dike's, students transform an everyday object into an artwork that speaks of who they are. The three strongest works will be exhibited.
At ART X Lagos, the work continues on a wall of large relief vessels, where children and visitors shape coils of clay by hand, echoing Kwali's technique, in an installation that grows throughout the fair. Students leave knowing that art can begin with anything: a pot, a memory, an everyday object. Drawing from the past, shaping new futures, together.
The Schools’ Programme this year includes:
- Educational Workshops On-Site at 5 Schools
- Inter-School Competition & Exhibition at ART X Lagos - Following the completion of the workshop on-site at the schools, a competition will be held to identify the 3 ‘most motivated’ students with the winners work being exhibited in the Kids’ Corner
- Students’ Tours of the Fair - Visits from hundreds of students from diverse schools and their supervisors, to ART X Lagos on Friday 7th November
Schools’ Programme is sponsored by ZTL Liquids Transfer.
