Baba Wagué Diakité

Malian, b. 1961

Plate
circa 1990

Porcelain
1.25 x 13 x 12.875 in.
Gift of Driek and Michael Zirinsky
2022.2

An elephant, turtle, fish, and two shrimp parade in a carnival of animals across Diakité’s lively Plate. The artist spent much of his childhood in the rural village of Kassaro, Mali, before moving to the capital of Bamako as a youth. He remembers a childhood spent “catching lizards and protecting rice and peanut fields from birds and monkeys,” animals that frequently appear in his later clay work. Diakité cites the stories of his mother and grandmother as his first education, and his role as artist-storyteller is evident in the iconography of this plate. The narrative sense is heightened by the three-dimensionality of Diakité’s animals, an effect he achieves by applying a black glaze into which he incises patterning before applying a clear coat to the entire plate.

Diakité experimented with drawing throughout his childhood in his native Mali, but he was introduced to ceramics by his wife, the American artist Ronna Neuenschwander, whom he met when she was traveling in his country. After moving with Neuenschwander to Portland, Oregon, he became a practicing artist and art educator. In addition to small-scale ceramics, Diakité has created ceramic murals and used ceramic tiles to illustrate his children’s books, including The Hunterman and the Crocodile, which received a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor in 1997.

Danielle Stewart

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This object has the following keywords:

• Animals - Sources:
  - A zoological revolution, 2002:
• fish
• polka dot
• Shrimps - Sources:
  - Random House
• stars - Massive self-luminous celestial bodies of gas that shine by radiation derived from internal energy sources. There are tens of billions of trillions of stars composing the visible universe.
• turtle

This object was included in the following exhibitions:

• Unearthed , 8/23/2022 - 5/14/2023

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