NEW YORK, NY (PNAN) – “Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina” is on view through February 3, 2023 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition focuses on the work of African American potters in the19th-century American South, consisting of approximately 50 ceramic objects from Old Edgefield District, South Carolina, a center of stoneware production in the decades before the Civil War.
Decades before the Civil War, a successful alkaline-glazed stoneware industry developed in Old Edgefield District, a clay-rich area in the westernmost part of South Carolina. From the beginning, enslaved African Americans were involved with all aspects of this labor-intensive industry. The stoneware they made were durable, impervious, utilitarian vessels of varying sizes and forms essential for food preparation and storage.
Hear Me Now sheds light on the many contributions and lived experiences of the hundreds of men, women and children who labored within slavery’s system of oppression by presenting a fuller picture of the region’s stoneware production.
The exhibition opens with a display of 12 monumental masterpieces by Edgefield’s best-known artist, David Drake known as Dave, signed, dated and incised verses on many of his jars, even though literacy among enslaved people was criminalized at the time. The verses bear witness to the joys, traumas and lived experience of enslavement, echoing the prose of abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs.
Highlights is the show is a selection of 19 regional face vessels, ceramic vessels embellished with hand-modeled facial features in high relief. The emergence of these vessels coincides roughly with the 1858 arrival of a slave ship illegally transporting more than 400 captive Africans, some 50 years after the transatlantic slave trade had been outlawed in the United States. More than 100 of these individuals were sent to Edgefield, where many were put to work in the potteries.
Growing evidence suggests that this late arrival of captive Africans served as a catalyst in the re-emergence of African-inspired art, religion and culture in the region. Face vessels bear a close resemblance to minkisi, or ritual objects, which were important in West-Central African religious practices where ritual experts used kaolin as a sacred substance to facilitate communication between the living and the dead. Kaolin inserts are found in Edgefield face vessels, suggesting similar spiritual meanings.
In addition, the exhibition also steps back centuries prior to European and American incursions on what is now the southeastern United States 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.
For a virtual tour, join co-curators Adrienne Spinozzi, Associate Curator in The American Wing at The Met; Ethan Lasser, John Moors Cabot Chair of the Art of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Jason Young, Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0g3pC4cgu0.
Note: The exhibit will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (March 6-July 9, 2023), 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).