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The Life and Labor of Enslaved Potter Dave Drake, with Ethan Lasser
37 Plays5 years ago
In 1834 a law was passed in South Carolina that prohibited slaves from reading or writing. The punishment for transgressors? Fifty lashes. That same year, Dave Drake, an enslaved potter at work in Edgefield County inscribed his first poem on a large stoneware jug he'd made. In this episode of the podcast, Ethan Lasser, chair of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, tells Dave’s story and that of an 1857 storage jar that bears the epigrammatic lines: "I made this Jar for Cash-/ though its called lucre trash/ Dave.”
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Transcript
Introduction to Freeman's Auction House
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Since 1805, Freemans has been part of the Fabric of Philadelphia, helping generations of clients in the buying and selling of fine and decorative arts, jewelry, design, and more.
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Freemans hosts many departmental and single-owner auctions throughout the year and are always accepting consignments of suitable works across auction and collecting categories.
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Visit freemansauction.com to request a complimentary auction estimate or to speak with one of their specialists.
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Sharing the world of art, design, and jewelry with you wherever you are.
Guest Introduction: Ethan Lasser
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Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects brought to you by the Magazine Antiques.
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I'm Ben Miller, and my guest today is Ethan Lasser, who is the chair of the Art of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
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But I should say that his interests and expertise is actually pretty broad-ranging.
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He and I have actually done some business together involving antique English silver, among other things.
Who was Dave the Potter?
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So, I'm
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But we're actually talking about American art today.
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And there's a really interesting character that some of you may be familiar with already.
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But this was actually a new name for me, which reveals my ignorance of Americana, I'm afraid.
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But this is a...
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a potter named conveniently Dave the Potter, or also known as David Drake.
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And Ethan, I'm excited to have you on to talk about this great American craftsman and the really fascinating history of his work and his, you know, he was born a slave and actually, you know,
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survived the Civil War, but most of his work that survives is the product of slave labor, which makes it quite an interesting and rich subject for conversation and a good platform for diving into a little bit of American decorative arts history.
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So, Ethan, thanks
Museum's Response to COVID-19
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so much for joining me.
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Yeah, thank you for having me.
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It's good to talk.
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And I actually, you know, before we dive into David Drake, I want to just ask how things are going for you up in Boston and how things are going at the museum.
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Yeah, it's been more than two months now.
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So on March 12th, we, like so many people, made the
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you know, decision that we were going to close.
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And I think most of us thought we'd be back in a month.
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And so my desk at work is probably a bit like a scene from some lost tomb with all the papers spread.
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And here we are, you know, more than two months later.
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And
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I think it's been I've never been away from the art, from the collection for this long in my whole professional career.
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And that part's been hard, I think, to be away from my colleagues and to be away from the galleries.
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But I have to say that.
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Over the weeks and months, we've really come together as a staff and have all these conversations with people who are missing the art as much as I am.
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And it's sort of gotten bigger and more resonant in my imagination.
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And that's been a nice part of this.
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It hasn't faded from view at all.
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And, you know, we're just at the point like I just before getting on with you, we've started to think about we were just in a Zoom meeting, which seems to be my life these days, thinking about what our reopening is going to look like and what we're going to offer and how to make people feel safe and what will the city want from us.
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So the conversation shifting to the future.
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Is it safe to say that you don't have anything approaching a timeline for reopening yet?
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I mean, no, it's such a shifting target.
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Like we're kind of eagerly watching our colleagues in Asia and Europe and some museums in Germany just open this week and trying to understand sort of what they're doing.
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visitors are like and who's coming and what we can learn from them and how we can plan accordingly.
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But yeah, we don't we were originally thinking July and I think we're now thinking the fall.
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Yeah.
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Well, and so what, in the meantime, you know, while you're confined to distance learning and online viewing and collections, what is the museum up to?
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I mean, how are you, are you still doing curatorial work in terms of, you know, research and preparing exhibitions and that sort of thing?
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And are you welcoming visitors for online events?
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And
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Yeah, we're definitely staying busy.
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Somehow it feels, you know, in the beginning, I think we were all trying to get our feet and our heads around what this would be about.
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Now it almost feels like it's getting too normal to be here at home.
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But to answer your question, we are doing events and trying to keep the collection alive, even from a distance, through conversation.
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And that's why I'm so excited to do this, because...
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I see this as a way of keeping the collection alive.
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We're, you know, we're planning, we're rethinking our schedule, we're rethinking and refocusing on what we can do with our collection.
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I think one...
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change that will come out of COVID and just the economic realities of the moment is more of a focus on a move away from the big international loan shows for some time and more of a focus on what we can do with our own collections.
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And so we've all been thinking and planning and coming up with ideas, proposals, and I'm lucky to work at a place with a vast collection that will satisfy that for a long time.
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That's an interesting idea.
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I mean, you know, one of my sort of bugaboos has often been the enormous fraction of museum collections that basically never go on view.
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And I wonder if this is a chance for museums to, as you suggest, to sort of look inward a little and maybe, you know, make a little more out of the great collections that they have in their storage rooms.
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Yeah.
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I think I think, you know, we're going to be whether we want to do that or not.
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I agree with you.
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I think it's a it's a nice opportunity to have that pressure and that constraint.
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But we're going to be pushed into this by virtue of just how expensive it is to do these big, big loan shows.
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And for a while now, I think you'll see more focus on on the collection.
00:07:15
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Yeah.
Researching Art in a Pandemic
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And in the meantime, what are you able to work on in your own research?
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I mean, have you been, because I, you know, I've had this experience.
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I also, you know, haven't been in the shop since March 13th, I think it was for us.
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And in some ways, of course, that's crippling.
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You know, we, I can't look at objects in person.
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And a lot of connoisseurial tools are basically broken when you can't handle a piece for yourself.
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But I've actually been surprised at how much I still am able to do in terms of online-based research.
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A lot of research collections are available online, obviously.
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A lot of primary source texts are available online.
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And so I found I'm actually able to keep pretty busy with a lot of the same kinds of work that I was doing before.
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Has that been your experience as well?
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You talk about the sort of angst of being away from the art, but are you still able to engage with it in that way?
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Yeah, I mean, you're totally right.
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I think we're lucky to live in an age where so much has been digitized and including for me, and we'll talk more about this project I'm working on about South Carolina and ceramics, but there are all these newspapers from the 1840s, 50s, 60s from these rural towns in South Carolina, and you can find them and read them online.
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So I've been doing that.
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I will say, though, that, you know, one of the things I've
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Yeah.
00:09:05
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assessing and seeing and seeing how big something is and what does this look like next to this and those are decisions that um you know i feel like our our world we actually do need to be in in in storage in the collections uh with with the stuff so it's it's been a real um lesson reminder uh for me of of uh why we why we need to be on site uh and in storage and it's going to be exhilarating to go back
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Yeah, yeah, I'm sure we're all going to have a new appreciation for that tactile experience.
The Life of Dave the Potter
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But so let's let's dive into the subject du jour.
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And and this is actually, you know, it's such a fascinating subject because.
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I often lament the fact that so many of the objects that I deal with in my daily life, you know, of course, as a silver dealer, I'm handling objects that were generally made for the creme de la creme of society.
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You know, only the wealthiest could really afford these objects.
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And frankly, you know, a lot of...
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the great works of art and decorative art were made by rich people and for rich people.
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That was, you know, the wealthiest can afford the best and the most talented want to make for the wealthiest.
00:10:23
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So that's sort of the way that a lot of art and decorative art seems to go.
00:10:29
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But there are other areas of study in material culture that bring us, you know, into a little more grounding and
00:10:39
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socioeconomically speaking.
00:10:40
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And, you know, what more dramatic example of that than a slave craftsman?
00:10:47
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So let's start out by just, you know, getting a little sense for the biography of this remarkable fellow, Dave.
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So what do we actually know about him?
00:11:01
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Yeah, so we know what we're trying to, the more you learn, the more you know what you don't know.
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But what we know, we roughly know he was born in the 1810s and dies sometime after 1870.
00:11:17
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We know that he spent most of his life, his whole life in Edgefield, South Carolina, which is Western kind of Georgia, South Carolina border, a region famous for its natural clays.
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And we know...
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places where he was enslaved, plants, specific people who are listed as his owners and how that changes over time.
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We know a bit about his family who at one point tragically get sold away.
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And what we mostly know is
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his incredible output of ceramics, most notably these large vessels where he signed his name and dated.
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And there are about 40 examples of signed, dated, large-scale vessels distinguished remarkably with poetic verse, so short couplets.
00:12:19
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Yeah, so that gets into a really interesting aspect of his biography, which is that he was literate, which for a slave was a really unusual thing and actually an illegal thing throughout much of the South.
00:12:36
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Yeah, I mean—
00:12:39
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Yeah, go ahead.
00:12:40
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I was just going to say, astonishingly, I mean, we think we were learning that more enslaved people were reading than we understood, mostly reading the Bible.
00:12:52
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But astonishingly, to your point, so 1834, there's a law in South Carolina state law that says if reading and writing by a slave is subject to 50 lashes, it's there in the books.
00:13:09
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There's a fear that literacy will lead to insurrection, a fear that people could pass notes between one another.
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And that same year is the year of the first poem, the first Dave poem.
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So...
00:13:25
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Pretty, pretty interesting coincidence or maybe not a coincidence, but the the law, despite the law or in spite of the law, he spends the next 30 years inscribing not pieces of paper that are ephemeral, but big stoneware vessels with words.
00:13:44
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And the way that he learned to read, it seems like probably had something to do with the way that he learned to make pottery, that is via his owner, right?
00:13:56
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Yeah, I mean, there's lots of mythologies about this.
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We don't exactly know the answer.
00:14:00
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We know that the first person who he worked for, Harvey, was an owner of a newspaper, a very short-lived newspaper called the Edgefield Hive.
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And we know that there were enslaved people working in the newspaper business at this time, laying type.
00:14:21
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So we maybe could surmise that Dave had that role and maybe learn to read that way, although he could have learned from his parents or other enslaved people around him.
00:14:35
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So it's hard to say, but where he goes with it, I think, is very distinctive.
00:14:43
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But so one way or another, he learns how to read and he also learns how to make pottery.
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He is, of course, producing pottery for the benefit of his owner.
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But he does, you know, these are not
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sort of mass-produced cookie-cutter objects, they're pieces that have his hallmark on them, in some cases literally his mark.
00:15:09
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As you say, he signs some of these pieces and others have poems on them and others are identifiable in other ways, right?
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Yeah, they're really one of the ways they're identifiable.
00:15:22
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And in his time, you know, there's a large ceramics industry in this region and tens of thousands of pots being produced on an annual basis.
00:15:31
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We can talk about that.
00:15:32
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But he gets famous not for as much for the verse as for the size of his pot.
00:15:38
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So he's throwing the largest pots, you know, 20 up to 25, even 30 gallon stoneware vessels.
00:15:47
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which means that he's on a kick wheel, so before electricity, he's throwing or raising up 70, 100 pounds of clay.
00:15:57
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And just the virtuosity, when you talk to a ceramicist about these objects, you learn how difficult that is.
00:16:05
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And that's one of the other hallmarks is just the size of the vessels.
00:16:10
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So how big is a vessel that holds 30 gallons?
00:16:14
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So like the MFA example is about two feet tall by 19 inches wide.
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So they're kind of barrel size.
00:16:25
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Right.
00:16:25
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Wow.
00:16:25
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That's bigger than a keg at a frat party.
00:16:32
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Yeah.
00:16:33
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Right.
00:16:33
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That's actually a great comparable.
00:16:36
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So what?
00:16:37
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I don't think they were storing meat, not beer, but same idea.
00:16:42
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Okay.
00:16:42
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Yeah, I was going to ask.
00:16:44
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So you say there are thousands of pods being produced in this region and presumably being distributed around the region, around the country.
00:16:54
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How widespread was the distribution for these pieces?
00:16:58
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Yeah, so, you know, we're in a world of pre-refrigeration, pre-plastic, pre, you know, you're used to dealing with luxury storage material of silver, but ceramics was the kind of Tupperware of its day.
00:17:16
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So we know that there are these huge cotton-picking plantations in South Carolina, and to feed the labor force, the enslaved labor force on those plantations, vast quantities of food are needed and vast quantities of ceramics to store that food.
00:17:36
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And they range in scale.
00:17:38
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I'm talking about Dave, who was making the biggest pots, but they're syrup jars and butter churns and
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Small, you know, alcohol jars, like smaller, smaller things, too.
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And we find them.
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Edgefield is the western side of South Carolina.
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It's on the Georgia border.
00:17:56
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We find them throughout northern Georgia.
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And then they're all the way across South Carolina in Charleston on the seacoast.
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And.
00:18:06
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They've turned up basically around the state.
00:18:10
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The rise of the ceramics industry coincides with the rise of the railroad.
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And the transportation network is key to the volume and output.
00:18:22
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Okay, so these pieces are being taken for commercial purposes on trains, maybe to places like Charleston and then being used in households there.
00:18:32
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Uh, households and in, um, uh, kind of general store contexts.
00:18:36
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So, uh, you'd be, um, selling grain or selling meat in these vessels and sometimes selling the vessel with the food.
00:18:46
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It's packaging.
00:18:47
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Right.
00:18:48
Speaker
So where that was, was Dave sort of the only standout potter of this period of this region, or are there other artisans that we know by name?
Artisans and Industrial Slavery
00:18:58
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Yeah, we're learning more about that.
00:19:01
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And there's been some great scholarship on who some of the other enslaved potters were.
00:19:06
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We know more about the name of the competitors and who are the white potters who
00:19:16
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We don't know this for sure, but likely we're not doing the work.
00:19:19
Speaker
So Thomas Chandler is an example.
00:19:22
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He's a potter, but he also has slaves throwing pots or there's a Drake potter.
00:19:30
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There are other potters in the orbit of Edgefield who are competitors.
00:19:37
Speaker
I mean, I think of slavery as being largely an agricultural practice in antebellum South Carolina.
00:19:45
Speaker
But was this a fairly common arrangement for artisans and craftsmen to employ large quantities of slave labor?
00:19:54
Speaker
Yeah, great question.
00:19:55
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So I'm working on this research project and future exhibition project with my colleague at the Metropolitan, Adrian Spinozzi, who's a curator of ceramics.
00:20:06
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And one of the big points that Adrian often makes is that, just as you say, we never think of
00:20:13
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We always think we're taught to think of agricultural slavery, but industrial slavery, which is what this is, is not at the same scale, but it's still happening.
00:20:23
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There's iron working, there's ceramic making, there are slaves in furniture shops, there are slaves working with painters in the South and in earlier periods in the North.
00:20:33
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So it's certainly there.
00:20:47
Speaker
We'll take a break and be right back with Ethan Lasser.
00:20:50
Speaker
First, just a reminder that you can see images of Dave's pots at themagazineanteeth.com slash podcast.
00:20:56
Speaker
And I'd love to hear your comments and suggestions at curiousobjectspodcast at gmail.com or on Instagram at Objective Interest.
00:21:05
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00:21:08
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This helps others to find curious objects.
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00:22:19
Speaker
So let's go back to the objects themselves, these pots and jars.
00:22:27
Speaker
You say there are 40 or so of Dave's pieces that are known?
00:22:35
Speaker
Did I hear that right?
00:22:36
Speaker
Well, there are 40 with verse, so with his signature, with the date and with the poems.
00:22:42
Speaker
There's even more that have been attributed to him.
00:22:45
Speaker
And do you have any idea where the idea of putting verses on jars came from?
00:22:54
Speaker
Is this unique to him or are there other examples of that?
00:23:00
Speaker
Yeah, it's a great question.
00:23:01
Speaker
I mean, there is no real clear answer.
00:23:04
Speaker
I think that the other pottery being made in Edgefield and being kind of sold alongside this, the other wares in the market often have a maker's signature and sometimes a date and sometimes an inscription about where they're from.
00:23:23
Speaker
What Dave, Dave Drake, that's the name he takes at the end of his life,
00:23:28
Speaker
does is take that convention and kind of flip it and extend it and exaggerate it.
00:23:33
Speaker
You know, the only, they're British pots from earlier periods with poetry.
00:23:37
Speaker
We don't think he had much access to those.
00:23:40
Speaker
I tend to think of it as a building on an extension of a convention of signing and inscribing pots that is just taken in this whole other direction.
00:23:52
Speaker
Yeah, just adding his own sort of unique personal touch to it.
00:23:56
Speaker
I love, if you have it handy, I'd love to hear some of the verses on some of these pots.
00:24:02
Speaker
Yeah, sure, I can do that.
00:24:06
Speaker
And for your listeners, there's wonderful resources online, speaking of online resources, where all the poems have been compiled.
00:24:14
Speaker
But let's see.
00:24:16
Speaker
I'll give you a few examples.
00:24:17
Speaker
They range in tone from kind of
00:24:21
Speaker
loose, humorous jeering at someone to poems that have more seriousness and acknowledge the lived experience of slavery.
00:24:34
Speaker
So for example, 1840 he says, Dave belongs to Mr. Miles, so he's acknowledging his condition.
00:24:43
Speaker
Where the oven bakes and the pot biles, saying where he is.
00:24:49
Speaker
1857, shortly after we think, or in reference to the, as I mentioned, the selling of his, the separation from his family, one of the most heartbreaking poems is published or inscribed.
00:25:04
Speaker
I wonder where is all my relations, he says.
00:25:07
Speaker
Friendship to all in every nation.
00:25:09
Speaker
So just heartbreaking.
00:25:10
Speaker
I wonder where is all my relations?
00:25:13
Speaker
The one I'm most familiar with is at the Museum of Fine Arts here and here and where he says 1857 again, I made this jar for cash Kind of interesting to think about what that means Though it's called lucratrash for cash, right?
00:25:30
Speaker
Sorry, it's not the cash doesn't go to him presumably so yeah
00:25:37
Speaker
Wow, gosh, so these are really, in some cases, very personal messages.
00:25:44
Speaker
Yeah, we think that, I think the more you get to know the verse, the more you realize that at a certain point, it's almost as if he understands that he's speaking as much to his own time as he is to the future.
The Dual Audience of Dave's Work
00:25:58
Speaker
And these objects are bearing witness to the realities of being enslaved and, you know, seem to, he seems to have, like any great writer, he seems to have an audience in mind beyond his own time.
00:26:14
Speaker
So this is just purely asking you to speculate, but how do you imagine that people of his time who bought these pots, how do you think that they might have reacted to these verses?
00:26:30
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think you have to think about that.
00:26:33
Speaker
And that's actually been one of the main things I've been trying to think about.
00:26:36
Speaker
We know so much about how, in my own research, we know so much about how these pots were made and a lot of work into where the clay is coming from and
00:26:47
Speaker
how you actually physically manipulate that much clay.
00:26:51
Speaker
We know much less, though, about your question, the reception.
00:26:54
Speaker
And, you know, I think that one of the marks of Drake's kind of genius or intellect was the way that simultaneously he could kind of double speak.
00:27:05
Speaker
So he's saying one thing, or his verse reads one way to a white audience, to his enslavers, and a different way to his fellow enslaved.
00:27:15
Speaker
And, you know, he...
00:27:17
Speaker
He always gave himself... He always allowed his verses to be read as, you know, empty of meaning or they're full of spelling and punctuation errors, which I think were a way of saying, hey, I'm not threatening to you.
00:27:35
Speaker
On the other hand, at the same time, they're speaking in very serious tones, very serious ways.
00:27:43
Speaker
to a community of enslaved who would have appreciated, I think, the sentiment of the word.
00:27:49
Speaker
So they seem often to be pitching two ways at once.
00:27:53
Speaker
One of the themes that you can follow through the verse is kind of like any great artisan, Dave's kind of growing confidence, I made this jar, is a
00:28:05
Speaker
Lynette repeated a few times, great and noble jar, kind of celebrating his own work.
00:28:13
Speaker
So that to me is a way of saying, you know, I may be owned by you, but you guys are contingent on me.
00:28:21
Speaker
So which is a way that historians have spoken about enslaved artisans that they have more of they just have more power than, say, people picking cotton, because often their their skill set and certainly in this case, their skill set exceeds that of the kind of white people around them.
00:28:41
Speaker
So Dave seems to be dancing that line as well.
00:28:45
Speaker
Right.
00:28:45
Speaker
It's not just a matter of being able to produce an enormous amount of energy under duress, but actually having honed a sophisticated skill set.
00:28:57
Speaker
So what should I be on the lookout for if I'm wandering around Western South Carolina and popping into antique shops and I want to find a pot by Dave the Potter?
00:29:13
Speaker
What should I be looking out for?
00:29:14
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's not a hypothetical because these things are, you know, coming out of the woodwork.
00:29:22
Speaker
Literally, there was one, there's a new one.
00:29:24
Speaker
There seem to be new examples on the market.
00:29:27
Speaker
An auction house called Crocker Farms seems to continuously be bringing these new examples to the market, many of which
00:29:36
Speaker
museums have been pursuing.
00:29:37
Speaker
But, you know, they come, Edgefield stoneware comes in all shapes and sizes, and for every large jug selling for a six or seven figure number, the poem jugs are at that value now.
00:29:49
Speaker
There are, you know, more smaller
00:29:52
Speaker
two-gallon syrup jugs or jugs for grain or flour.
00:29:58
Speaker
And what you'll want that are much more ubiquitous and as beautiful and much more affordable, that's sort of the other end of the collecting market.
00:30:07
Speaker
And you'll look for the shape, you'll look for an alkaline glaze.
00:30:11
Speaker
They have these beautiful glazes because they were all local materials and wood-fired.
00:30:17
Speaker
You'll look for
00:30:20
Speaker
There's sometimes marks on them indicating their capacity.
00:30:24
Speaker
So say two hash marks is two gallons.
00:30:28
Speaker
You'll look for, I don't know, a certain lack of uniformity because while this is an industrial scale operation, it's also all hand labor.
00:30:38
Speaker
So they're not casting anything or everything's made on the wheel.
00:30:44
Speaker
And one of the pleasures of engaging with this material is
00:30:48
Speaker
is reaching into a pot.
00:30:50
Speaker
Maybe you've had an experience like this with hammer marks and silver, but reaching into a pot and feeling the throw rings.
00:30:56
Speaker
And that's the fingerprints.
00:30:58
Speaker
And that's something I look forward to.
00:31:00
Speaker
But yeah, they're certainly the story is getting more and more known.
00:31:06
Speaker
So act fast.
00:31:10
Speaker
Is there a market for fakes at this point?
00:31:16
Speaker
It's interesting.
00:31:19
Speaker
Even historically, there's a sort of side, a tradition which Adrian, who I mentioned, knows quite a bit about, of Edgefield face jugs.
00:31:28
Speaker
And they're smaller vessels kind of ornamented to look like faces.
00:31:35
Speaker
And those are made...
00:31:37
Speaker
for two or three decades by enslaved people.
00:31:40
Speaker
And then we know in the late 1930s, early 20th century, white potters begin to kind of copy and make that form, which becomes a bit of a symbol of the South.
00:31:50
Speaker
So there are even, you know, older objects that are, I don't know if we call those fakes, but they're not exactly what one might think they are.
00:32:01
Speaker
That's interesting.
00:32:02
Speaker
In a sense, sort of reclaiming an imagined idea of a certain Southern past.
00:32:10
Speaker
That's right.
00:32:11
Speaker
That's right.
00:32:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:15
Speaker
I mean, I wonder, like, do you have a sense for when his work starts to be recognized as his work and as being significant?
Recognition of Dave's Legacy
00:32:27
Speaker
Yeah, we do.
00:32:29
Speaker
We've learned about the early collecting of this material.
00:32:34
Speaker
And it is really one woman in Charleston, South Carolina, who is named Laura Bragg, who in the 30s
00:32:46
Speaker
is working at the Charleston Museum and begins to take an interest in local South Carolina traditions and Laura Bragg discovers some of the biggest Dave Juggs and
00:33:02
Speaker
And learns from ex or emancipated slaves who are still alive at that time who this guy was and who the Dave on these pots is and begins to argue for taking them seriously and acquire some for the Charleston Museum.
00:33:22
Speaker
Wow.
00:33:23
Speaker
I mean, this is like the 1930s.
00:33:26
Speaker
You're talking about the very early stages of the flourishing of cultural anthropology.
00:33:33
Speaker
And it sounds like this Laura Bragg woman is doing what seems like actually some pretty sophisticated ethnographic work.
00:33:44
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's really interesting.
00:33:45
Speaker
I hadn't thought, you know, what's driving her and what her education is are questions to look into, for sure.
Future Exhibition Plans
00:33:54
Speaker
So tell me more about this exhibit.
00:33:56
Speaker
I know it's the timeline, as with everything else, is uncertain now, but what are you working on and what are your goals for the show?
00:34:04
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm working with Adrian at the Met for a project that will open at the Met and then come to the MFA.
00:34:14
Speaker
And it will really introduce people in our part of the country to this story for the first time, few of whom know about Edgefield or know about the connection between slavery and ceramics.
00:34:27
Speaker
And so what we're trying to do is bring together both some of the great works by Dave Drake, some of the great poem jars, but also works by some of the other potters in his orbit, some of those people I mentioned who were signing pots and pots associated with other enslaved makers.
00:34:48
Speaker
And really trying to offer a story of some of the only works of art that we have that can be very definitively associated with slaves and made by slaves.
00:35:02
Speaker
And what does that mean?
00:35:04
Speaker
And what does it mean to show them in an art museum?
00:35:06
Speaker
And what can we take from them?
00:35:09
Speaker
And how do they change our picture of what slavery was about?
00:35:16
Speaker
Well, that sounds like a very exciting show.
00:35:18
Speaker
I'm sorry that it may be some time before we're actually able to go and visit the exhibition.
00:35:26
Speaker
Yeah, right now it's about two years out, so 2022.
00:35:33
Speaker
Right, okay.
00:35:34
Speaker
And I suppose we're presuming that museums are going to be open by 2022.
00:35:40
Speaker
Fingers crossed, fingers crossed, yeah.
00:35:43
Speaker
Well, thanks so much.
00:35:44
Speaker
This is a totally fascinating subject, and I'm thrilled to learn a bit more about it.
00:35:49
Speaker
Are there, you know, in the coming months as we wait for our chance to see this, are there resources that you'd suggest for people who are interested in learning more?
00:36:02
Speaker
Yeah, there's a number of important studies by ceramics historians from South Carolina.
00:36:13
Speaker
The kind of seminal book is called Great and Noble Jar by Cinda Baldwin.
00:36:20
Speaker
There are a lot of material online about collecting all of the verse.
00:36:27
Speaker
And I've learned a lot, or my own thinking about this maker has been informed by thinking about that other great writer of this period, Frederick Douglass.
00:36:38
Speaker
And so reading Douglass's autobiography, but also David Blight's biography of Douglass has been very helpful.
00:36:47
Speaker
Not that they knew each other, but...
00:36:49
Speaker
only to say they lived at the same time.
00:36:51
Speaker
And at least Douglas comes from a southern plantation, so has some of the same background.
00:36:59
Speaker
Yeah, funnily enough, David Blight has actually been on Curious Objects before.
00:37:02
Speaker
Oh, great.
00:37:05
Speaker
friend of the podcast.
00:37:06
Speaker
Anyway, yeah, that all sounds quite interesting.
00:37:12
Speaker
There's clearly a lot to dig into here.
00:37:14
Speaker
There are, you know, as always, we're going to post photos of some of these jars on the magazineantiques.com slash podcast.
00:37:24
Speaker
And I hope we can find that list of
00:37:28
Speaker
verses that you mentioned and put that up online as well.
00:37:34
Speaker
So listeners, I hope you'll go and check those out.
00:37:38
Speaker
And do look forward to this exhibition at the Met and the MFA Boston in, fingers crossed, 2022.
00:37:46
Speaker
So Ethan Latharoth, thank you so much for joining me.
00:37:49
Speaker
It was a pleasure.
00:37:50
Speaker
Great.
00:37:50
Speaker
Thank you.
00:37:51
Speaker
And stay safe out there.
00:38:04
Speaker
To be honest, it's a little lonely wrapping this up without Michael here, so let me just make a quick plug on my way out.
00:38:09
Speaker
Michael and I are still working together very closely over the New Antiquarians, which, if you enjoy this podcast, is a group you should definitely be checking out.
00:38:18
Speaker
And if you're craving more antiques content, I know you are.
00:38:21
Speaker
We are doing regular live events and presentations and panel discussions during quarantine over there at New Antiquarians.
00:38:28
Speaker
Best way to find us is on Instagram at New Antiquarians, where you can also sign up to get emails about upcoming events.
00:38:36
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
00:38:39
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit, and I'm Ben Miller.