Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina

Spinozzi, Adrienne, with contributions by Michael J. Bramwell, Vincent Brown, Katherine C. Hughes, Ethan W. Lasser, Simone Leigh, and Jason R. Young (2022)

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Description

A reckoning of the central role of enslaved and free Black potters in the long-standing stoneware traditions of Edgefield, South Carolina

Recentering the development of industrially scaled Southern pottery traditions around enslaved and free Black potters working in the mid-nineteenth century, this catalogue presents groundbreaking scholarship and new perspectives on stoneware made in Edgefield, South Carolina. Among the remarkable works included are a selection of regional face vessels as well as masterpieces by enslaved potter and poet David Drake, who signed, dated, and incised verses on many of his jars, even though literacy among enslaved people was criminalized at the time. Essays on the production, collection, dispersal, and reception of stoneware from Edgefield offer a critical look at what it means to collect, exhibit, and interpret objects made by enslaved artisans. Several featured contemporary works inspired by or related to Edgefield stoneware attest to the cultural and historical significance of this body of work, and an interview with acclaimed contemporary artist Simone Leigh illuminates its continued relevance.

Table of contents

Director’s Foreword
Preface
Adrienne Spinozzi
Contributors
Lenders to the Exhibition
Map of Old Edgefield District Pottery Sites
Note to the Reader

The Art of Enslaved Labor
Vincent Brown

Confronting, Collecting, and Celebrating Edgefield Stoneware
Adrienne Spinozzi

Incidents in the Life of an Enslaved Abolitionist Potter Written by Others
Michael J. Bramwell and Ethan W. Lasser

“But Oh the Clay Is Vile”: Edgefield Pottery in Life and Death
Jason R. Young

A Conversation with Simone Leigh
Jason R. Young

Plates

Works in the Exhibition

Verses by Dave

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Photography Credits

About the authors

Adrienne Spinozzi is Associate Curator in the American Wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Michael J. Bramwell is a visual artist, doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Linde Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Vincent Brown is the Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

Katherine C. Hughes is 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.

Ethan W. Lasser is the John Moors Cabot Chair of the Art of the Americas Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Simone Leigh is an internationally acclaimed artist based in New York and the U.S. representative at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where she was awarded the Gold Lion.

Jason R. Young is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

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Michael J Bramwell

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Katherine C Hughes

Ethan W Lasser

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Adrienne Spinozzi

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Exhibition

Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina

September 9, 2022—February 5, 2023

Focusing on the work of African American potters in the 19th-century American South—in dialogue with contemporary artistic responses—the exhibition presents approximately 50 ceramic objects from Old Edgefield District, South Carolina, a center of stoneware production in the decades before the Civil War. Hear Me Now will include monumental storage jars by enslaved and literate potter and poet David Drake alongside rare examples of the region’s utilitarian wares, as well as enigmatic face vessels whose makers were unrecorded. Considered through the lens of current scholarship in the fields of history, literature, anthropology, material culture, diaspora, and African American studies, these 19th-century vessels testify to the lived experiences, artistic agency, and material knowledge of enslaved peoples.