Brewing, pouring and sipping from the venerable beer pot, there is no greater way to celebrate, to honor or to memorialize in Zulu culture. Potter Jabulile Nala is fully invested in the 2,000-year-old tradition. Hailing from one of the leading families of Zulu ceramicists and daughter of world-renowned potter Nesta Nala, her family lineage of female potters traces back to 1900. Born in Eshowe, South Africa, she and her sisters learned from their highly skilled mother and grandmother. They continue the family’s legacy as acclaimed artists themselves, with their reverence for Zulu tribal connections in each piece they create. After sculpting objects from hand, Nala places them in a hole in the ground and then loads them with covered tinder. To blacken the pots, she fires them twice. Once the fire has been consumed, she rubs on animal fat as a polish to add a soft luster. Nala combines the old with the new. She uses classic patterns, such as one inspired by past Zulu warriors’ scarred body decorations, skillfully using negative space in her design. Other pots display configurations of dots, each to represent the number of cows under ownership. From farmers to tribal chiefs, the way they “counted” their cows was by applying small dots on the pots, a practice called Amansumpa. The venerated beer ceremony celebrates births, burials, and everything in between in Zulu culture. The drink is brewed in the largest, unadorned and unburnished pots, and poured into the smaller decorated rimless pots. Meshing generations-old practice with elegance, Jabulile Nala has earned national and international acclaim, and her work is in collections worldwide. We have a number of important works from Jabu Nala, as well as from her daughter, Ncamsile Nala, whose talented hands turn a contemporary twist.