Arts

A New Exhibit Illuminates Edgefield Pottery

Beneath the rim, a handwritten inscription: “when you fill this Jar with pork or beef / Scot will be there; to get a peace, – / Dave.” In a literal sense, the poem doubles as instructions for how to use the alkaline-glazed container, but when David Drake, an enslaved potter in Edgefield, South Carolina, inscribed it on the storage jar in April 1858, it was an act of defiance. Anti-literacy laws forbade enslaved and free people of color to learn to read or write. Drake’s jar is part of Hear Me Now, a powerful exhibition on Edgefield pottery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, which opened September 9. “Edgefield stoneware is known regionally, but this project will present these objects—and the history and makers behind the stoneware—to new audiences,” says Adrienne Spinozzi, a curator of the more than fifty objects on display, many never seen before outside the South. Drake’s nineteenth-century masterwork sits on view beside vessels by lesser-known—or still-unknown—artists who also demonstrated their literacy, bravery, and adeptness at the potter’s wheel. “Face jugs,” or vessels shaped with grimacing expressions, are unmissable, including the mid-nineteenth-century pot treasured by Mamie Deveaux, an African American fortune-teller who practiced in Savannah. Works by modern-day artists including Simone Leigh and Robert Pruitt sit in discourse with the historical objects, “exploring this rich and complicated history,” Spinozzi says. “They’re literally reshaping the conversation about Edgefield stoneware.”

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An 1858 alkaline-glazed storage jar made by David Drake at the Stony Bluff Manufactory in Old Edgefield District, South Carolina. The inscription reads: “this Jar is to Mr Segler who keeps the bar in orangeburg / For Mr Edwards a Gentle man — who formly kept / Mr thos bacons horses / April 21 1858 / when you fill this Jar with pork or beef / Scot will be there; to Get a peace, — / Dave.”

Photo: © Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Eileen Travell

An alkaline-glazed jug made by David Drake in 1853.

Photo: © Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Eileen Travell

The inscription on this 1857 storage jar by David Drake reads: “I wonder where is all my relation / Friendship to all — and every nation / Lm Aug 16, 1857 Dave.”

Photo: © Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Eileen Travell

A face jug made by an unrecorded potter, attributed to Miles Mill Pottery sometime between 1867 and 1885.

Photo: © Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Eileen Travell

A watercooler that was likely made by Thomas M. Chandler, Jr. in the Phoenix Stone Ware Factory in 1840. 

Photo: © Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Eileen Travell

A storage jar made by an unrecorded potter between 1840 and 1853, possibly in the Phoenix Stone Ware Factory or Collin Rhodes Factory in Old Edgefield District, South Carolina.

Photo: © Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Eileen Travell

An alkaline-glazed face jug made by an unrecorded potter in Edgefield between 1850 and 1870.

Photo: © Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Eileen Travell

A contemporary glazed jug made by New York–based artist Simone Leigh in 2021.

Photo: courtesy of Simone Leigh and Matthew Marks Gallery