A recent exhibit at Atlanta’s High Museum challenges many common ideas about art and about slavery. Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina is also an amazing and emotional experience.
Most people think of art as produced by artists who are free to choose what they create, but Hear Me Now is an exhibit of work produced under duress by enslaved artists. Most people associate slavery in America with field crops and plantation servants, but this work was produced in a context that can only be called industrial slavery.
Many of the works have no name attached; the exhibit identifies them as “______ maker(s) once known,” for they were, to their peers. Some bear at most the names of their owners who were the owners of the potteries. And a few bear the name of their actual makers, especially in the case of one remarkable person, Dave, later known in freedom as David Drake.
Two large storage jugs from the 1840s and 1850s by David Drake
The work of those potteries was widely traded across the South. Edgefield stoneware was known for its durability, impervious glazes and reasonable prices. By the 1840s, they were producing tens of thousands of pieces a year. Much of it was ordinary day-to-day ware, but as the exhibit shows, even vessels designed for mundane use can have artistic interest.
Hear Me Now was organized by the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and was exhibited at both as well as at the University of Michigan; it finishes its time at the High on May 12, but hopefully will be shown again elsewhere.
David Drake’s work is unusual in another way besides the survival of his name: he often not only signed his work, but decorated it with sayings and poems. Since at the time it was illegal to teach enslaved people to read or write, it is not clear how he was able to get away with it. He may have taught himself to read while working as a typesetter at a newspaper owned by one of his owners.
Some of the poems are quite pointed: One jug, dated December 6, 1858 is marked “Nineteen days before Christmas Eve, Lots of people after its over, How they will greave,” a reference to common year-end sales of slaves to other owners.
After the Civil War, David Drake continued to live and work in the area, and appears on voter rolls during Reconstruction. Born in 1801, he is believed to have died in the 1870s, fifty years before the Charleston Museum added one of his large signed jugs to its collection, the first recognition of the art of the enslaved potters of Old Edgefield.
Dave, of course, is not the only artist among the Edgefield potters; he is just the only one whose name has not been lost. There are a dozen or so pieces of his work in the exhibit, and many from others. While the two pieces above have no names attached, the one at the top bears the name of Abner Landrum, the slave-owner who started Edgefield’s first pottery and enslaved David Drake.
Highly-decorated jugs such as these two were sometimes made to order for customers whose names were added. The upper one includes images of two women that may have represented Joel Ridgel’s first and second wives, although their faces are colored with an iron-based black slip glaze.
Among the items featured in the exhibit and commonly produced in the Edgefield potteries were many variations of face jugs, featuring human images that were often grotesque or comic. Most were either generally untilitarian or decorative, but a few, including the one just below, were used by religious practitioners as part of ritual healing practices.
The exhibit includes two other facets. One is a selection of modern works by African-American and Native American artists that draw on materials and themes of the exhibit; the other is a small selection of work by Black craftspeople and artisans of the same era and just aft er as the Edgefield pottery work.
Above, two quilted bed covers, one from Georgia and one from North Carolina from the late years of the 19th century. Below, an Appalachian-style early 19th-century sideboard made by enslaved workers in North Carolina, and an early 20th-century blanket chest made by Brooks Thompson, a formerly enslaved woodworker.
The more recent but related works include one by a member of the Catawba tribe, whose use of Edgefield-area clay deposits goes back centuries. His ‘cupid jug,’ on the left, was made in 2000. The large bowl on the right is the work of Native potters, likely dating to the 1500s.
Secrets Safe, a 2022 piece by Woody De Othello, provides a modern take on the Edgefield face jug tradition. Simone Leigh’s 2022 Large Jug also builds on the face jug concept, with two African references: the cowrie shells, and the white kaolin glaze common to both Edgefield and Congolese traditions. Below that, another piece by Simone Leigh carries the face jug in a different direction.
To finish, here is a memory jar, made in the early 1900s by a “maker once known.” The clay jar is covered with ceramic shards and found objects; it is related to ritual grave decorations in the Congo region of Africa. There, such jars serve not only as memorials, but as guides for spirits moving into the afterlife. Memory and a new life and understanding, mark Hear It Now.
Excellent article!