On view March 4–July 9, 2023
BOSTON (February 16, 2023)—Opening at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), on March 4, Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina tells a story about art and enslavement—and about the joy, struggle, creative ambition and lived experience of African Americans in the decades before the Civil War. The landmark exhibition presents nearly 60 ceramic objects from Old Edgefield, South Carolina, bringing together monumental storage jars by the enslaved and literate potter and poet Dave (later recorded as David Drake about 1800–about 1870) with rare examples of the region’s utilitarian wares and enigmatic face vessels by unrecorded makers. Hear Me Now also links past to present by including the work of leading contemporary Black artists who have responded to or whose practice resonates with the Edgefield story: Theaster Gates, Adebunmi Gbadebo, Simone Leigh, Woody De Othello and Robert Pruitt. Working primarily in clay, these artists respond to the legacy of the Edgefield potters and consider the resonance of this untold chapter in American history for today’s audiences.
“Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina” is generously supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the Americana Foundation. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, The Bruce and Laura Monrad Fund for Exhibitions, the Dr. Lawrence H. and Roberta Cohn Exhibition Fund, the Eugenie Prendergast Memorial Fund, and an anonymous funder. Media Partner is WCVB Channel 5 Boston. The exhibition is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Hear Me Now is the first exhibition in MFA’s history to bring together works that are unequivocally attributed to enslaved Americans—offering us a glimpse into the lives of men, women and children too often forgotten,” said Ethan Lasser, exhibition co-curator and John Moors Cabot Chair, Art of the Americas. “In addition to new scholarship, the exhibition benefited from an open curatorial process, one that involved many voices and points of view. We’re grateful to all of our contributors—including artists, MFA staff and local community members—for helping us to bring this important chapter in American history to a much wider and national audience.”
Exhibition Overview
In the early 1800s, white settlers established potteries in the Old Edgefield district, a rural area on the western edge of South Carolina, to take advantage of its natural clays. Enslaved African Americans led all aspects of this labor-intensive industry, producing tens of thousands of vessels each year by the 1840s. The stoneware they made—durable vessels of varying sizes and forms essential for food preparation and storage—supported the region’s expanding population and was inextricably linked to the demands of a lucrative plantation economy. While the history of slavery is primarily understood in terms of agricultural crops like cotton and tobacco production, these wares tell the story of what historians term “industrial slavery,” where knowledge, experience and expertise was paramount.
Hundreds of enslaved men, women and children were forced to work in Edgefield’s potteries, bearing responsibility for all aspects of this labor-intensive craft: mining and preparing clay; throwing vast quantities of ware; decorating and glazing vessels; gathering fuel for and overseeing firing; building, loading and unloading kilns; and transporting wares to markets across the region. White enslavers and factory owners often marked wares with their own names, claiming the labor and knowledge of the enslaved as their own. Only some of the enslaved makers have been identified so far—more than 100 of their names are highlighted in the exhibition, drawn from archives and ledger books.
Remarkably, Edgefield’s best-known artist, Dave—later recorded as David Drake—signed, dated and incised verses on many of his jars, even though literacy among enslaved people was criminalized at the time. His writing bears witness to the joys, traumas and lived experiences of enslavement, echoing the prose of abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. Hear Me Now features 12 of Dave’s monumental masterpieces, including a storage jar (1857) from the MFA’s collection. The MFA’s presentation also includes a video featuring Pauline Baker, Priscilla Carolina, Daisy Whitner and John Williams—descendants of Dave—reflecting on their family connections and his work for the first time in a public context.
Among the exhibition highlights is also a selection of 19 face vessels or jugs—powerful spiritual objects that were likely made by the Edgefield potters for their own use. Their emergence coincides roughly with the 1858 arrival in Georgia of The Wanderer, a slave ship illegally transporting more than 400 captive Africans, some 50 years after the transatlantic slave trade had been outlawed in the U.S. More than 100 of these individuals were sent to Edgefield, where many were put to work in the potteries. Growing evidence suggests that the arrival of these enslaved people led to the re-emergence of African-inspired art, religion and culture in the region. Face vessels bear a resemblance to minkisi, ritual objects that were important in West-Central African religious practices where ritual experts used kaolin (soft white clay used for pottery) as a sacred substance to facilitate communication between the living and the dead. The use of kaolin to represent eyes and teeth in Edgefield face vessels likely carries similar spiritual meanings.
Scattered throughout the exhibition are works by contemporary artists that respond to and amplify Edgefield’s story, filling gaps in an often-fragmentary history:
- Robert Pruitt (born 1975) is known for masterful, large-scale figurative drawings embedded with cultural symbols from Africa and the African diaspora. Birth and Rebirth and Rebirth (2019) are two works commissioned by the MFA that depict Sofia Meadows-Muriel, then a museum intern, wearing a quilt evocative of a work by African American artist Harriet Powers (1837–1910) and pouring water from one of the face vessels shown nearby. For Pruitt these objects show “Black people in America beginning to reflect themselves, to create culture.”
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Simone Leigh (born 1967) engages deeply with the historic form of face vessels across different bodies of work, exploring various scales and ceramic materials. Her monumental piece Jug (2021–22, courtesy of the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York) disrupts the idea that large-scale sculpture is mostly the province of male artists. Leigh looked to an Edgefield jug as a model but used the form as a canvas to display the cowrie shell, an object associated with trade and commerce throughout the African diaspora. The white glaze evokes the kaolin used in Congolese and Edgefield ritualistic tradition.
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Recently acquired by the MFA, the bold ceramic sculpture Applying Pressure (2021) by Woody De Othello (born 1992) also evokes the Edgefield face vessels. The sounds emitting from the piece evoke what the artist calls the “feeling of flowing.”
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Theaster Gates (born 1973) introduced Dave to the contemporary art world in his 2010 exhibition To Speculate Darkly: Theaster Gates and Dave the Potter. Using a poem jar as his anchor point, Gates explored his connection to Dave, an artist he calls “one of the most important craft figures in American history.” In Signature Study (2020, courtesy of the artist and White Cube, London), Gates revisits Dave’s work by inscribing his signature into a clay brick, exclaiming authorship in a world that continues to render the contributions of Black makers invisible.
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K.S. (2021) and other ceramics by Adebunmi Gbadebo (born 1992) raise questions about the memories embedded in clay. “Could I make work from the very land that my ancestors were enslaved on?” the artist asked, after traveling to the former True Blue Plantation in Fort Motte, South Carolina, where her family was forced to cultivate rice and indigo. She collected material for her sculptures at a historic burial ground on the plantation—turning the earth that ran through the hands of her ancestors into vessels that commemorate the history of her family members and their connection to the land.
Additionally, the exhibition steps back centuries prior to European and American incursions on what is now the southeastern U.S. when Indigenous peoples had developed tools and techniques to take advantage of the area’s rich clay deposits. Within the galleries is an example of an earthenware bowl dating to around 1500 by an unidentified Woodland artist, on view alongside a contemporary vessel by Earl Robbins, a Catawba Indian Nation potter.
Exhibition Organizers and Collaborators
The exhibition is co-curated by: Ethan Lasser, John Moors Cabot Chair, Art of the Americas, MFA Boston; Adrienne Spinozzi, Associate Curator in the American Wing, Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Jason Young, Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The team has been advised and supported by a national board of artists and scholars who have offered invaluable input and perspectives, throughout both the planning and development process. The introduction to the exhibition is authored by Vincent Brown, Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and a contributor to the exhibition catalogue.
The presentation at the MFA has been shaped by input from a staff working group and a cohort of local community leaders, artists and scholars organized through the Table of Voices, the Museum’s initiative for embedding community perspectives into exhibitions. The staff working group included Michael Bramwell, Joyce Linde Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art; Jordan Cromwell; Matigan Holloway; Josephine Kim; Dalia H. Linssen; Tatiana Klusak; Todd McNeel; Ronit Minchom; Catherine Johnson-Roehr; Sanah Rao; and Victoria Reed, Sadler Senior Curator for Provenance. The Table of Voices cohort included Paul Briggs, an artist-teacher at The Massachusetts College of Art and Design; Patricia Davis, an author and scholar of public memory, identity, race, gender and representation; Corey DePina, an accomplished rapper and workshop and program facilitator for ZUMIX programs; Golden, a photographer, poet, curator, author and community organizer; Arlene O. Hall, an Ordained Minister in the Church of God (COG) and Teaching Fellow for Old Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary; Karmimadeebora McMillan, an artist and the Director of the Post-Baccalaureate Program at SMFA at Tufts; Ellice Patterson, a choreographer, speaker and the Founder and Executive and Artistic Director of Abilities Dance; and Kyera Singleton, a doctoral candidate in the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor’s Department of American Culture and the Executive Director of the Royall House and Slave Quarters.
The exhibition debuted at the Met in September 2022. After the MFA’s presentation, it will travel to the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor (August 26, 2023–January 7, 2024) and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (February 16–May 12, 2024).
Audio Guide
The exhibition audio guide brings together artists, scholars—several from South Carolina—to consider the work of the enslaved potters of Edgefield within the context of a brutal system of oppression. Contributors include Brooke Bauer, citizen of the Catawba Nation, potter and Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee Knoxville; Vincent Brown, Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University; archaeologist George W. Calfas; artists Adebunmi Gbadebo and Glenn Ligon; potter David Mack; Tonya M. Matthews, President and CEO of the International African American Museum; and Edgefield historian Wayne O’Bryant. The tour is available for free on the Museum’s app MFA Mobile.
Publication
Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press, the accompanying book features essays on the production, collection, dispersal and reception of stoneware from Edgefield, offering a critical look at what it means to collect, exhibit and interpret objects made by enslaved artisans. The catalogue includes an interview with Simone Leigh, internationally acclaimed artist and the U.S. representative at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where she was awarded the Gold Lion. Additional contributors include the exhibition curators, Adrienne Spinozzi, Ethan Lasser, and Jason Young; Michael J. Bramwell, visual artist, doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Linde Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at MFA Boston; Vincent Brown, Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.; and Katherine C. Hughes, a doctoral candidate in public history at Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, and the Curator of Cultural Heritage and Community Engagement at McKissick Museum, University of South Carolina, Columbia.
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