"A brief history of and guide to contemporary Zulu pottery"--Back cover

A global survey of 100 of today's most important clay and ceramic artists, chosen by leading art world professionals. Vitamin C celebrates the revival of clay as a material for contemporary visual artists, featuring a wide range of global talent as selected by the world's leading curators, critics, and art professionals. Clay and ceramics have in recent years been elevated from craft to high art material, with the resulting artworks being coveted by collectors and exhibited in museums around the world. Packed with illustrations, Vitamin C is a vibrant and incredibly timely survey - the first of its kind. Artists include: Caroline Achaintre, Ai Weiwei, Aaron Angell, Edmund de Waal, Theaster Gates, Marisa Merz, Ron Nagle, Gabriel Orozco, Grayson Perry, Sterling Ruby, Thomas Schütte, Richard Slee, Clare Twomey, Jesse Wine, and Betty Woodman. Nominators include: Pablo Leon de la Barra, Iwona Blazwick, Mary Ceruti, Dan Fox, Jens Hoffmann, Christine Macel, James Meyer, Jed Morse, Beatrix Ruf, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Nancy Spector, Sheena Wagstaff, and Jonathan Watkins.

"Contemporary African Design offers a refreshing challenge to rigid perceptions of what African design looks like. Focusing primarily on interior decoration, the book presents fifty designers, artisans, and cooperatives based on the continent or part of the diaspora who are creating sophisticated and innovative products and interiors." --Publisher.

When Zulu women potters innovate or move to a more urban setting, they are asked why they have abandoned tradition. Yet when they continue to follow convention or choose to stay in rural areas, art historians speak of their work as unchanging symbols of the past. Burnished rejects both stereotypes, giving agency back to the artists. Featuring 90 beautiful color images, Burnished engages directly with specific vessels and artists and fractures assumptions that Zulu ceramicists are insulated from rural transformation and urban realities. Elizabeth Perrill shares the fascinating stories of women potters and the ceramic beer pots they create--their aesthetics, audiences, production, and artistic lives. Simultaneously, Perrill documents the manner in which ceramic arts, and at times the artists themselves, capitalize upon bucolic stereotypes of rural womanhood, are constrained by artistic methods, or chafe against definitions of what qualifies as a Zulu pot. By revealing how White South Africa and global art gatekeepers have continually twisted the designation of Zulu ceramics before, during, and after apartheid, Burnished provides an engaging look at the entrepreneurial artistry of Black women who are often erased from historical records.