Installation shot: Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Edgefield exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Object: David Drake (Dave the Potter), Twenty-Five Gallon Four-Handled Stoneware Jar, 1858. Stoneware with alkaline glaze, 24 1/2 × 24 1/4 × 24 1/4 in. Collection: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas.
Soon to close is a powerful and poignant exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hear me Now: The Black Potters of Edgefield South Carolina presents approximately 50 ceramic objects made by African American potters during the 19th century, alongside contemporary artistic responses by Simon Leigh, Robert Pruitt and others. The stoneware vessels – made in the Old Edgefield District of South Carolina, an important center of this industry in the decades before and around the Civil War – were products of involuntary labor, manufactured by enslaved African-American peoples, situating their genesis within the complex and problematic history of the South. These pots are also extraordinary works of art, and serve as important records of material culture, stirring testaments to lived experience, technical knowledge, artistic agency, and the spirit of individual makers, some known, others whose names are now lost to us. Well represented are the pots of Edgefield’s best-known artist, a potter and poet named Dave. During his lifetime, Dave the Potter (who eventually took the surname Drake) was recognized and highly sought after for the excellent quality and craftsmanship of his monumental, akaline-glazed pots. He likely made thousands of jugs, storage jars and other other stoneware vessels. Many of these were inscribed with the potter’s name and short verses bearing witness to his traumas, joys, relationships and daily experiences. These inscriptions – ranging from biblical and mundane to witty and elusive – represent a defiant and confident expression of selfhood at a time in the US when writing was considered a punishable offense for someone of enslaved status.