In 2020, buyers included the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as the more historically oriented International African American Museum, currently under construction in Charleston, S.C. It’s not quite 15 inches tall, but this jar points to the artistic achievements of enslaved African Americans and the persistent erasure of their work from America’s cultural institutions for nearly 300 years. Just as notable, experts say, is that the jar is dated “12 April 1836,” two years after South Carolina passed an especially punitive anti-literacy law designed to prevent slaves from writing, making this single word an extraordinary act of resistance or defiance by Drake. Across the shoulder runs one word that Drake inscribed, with a sharpened stick or similar tool: “catination,” a variant of catenation, the state of being yoked or chained. Come closer and you see the wild runs of alkaline glaze up and down the surface, and some revealing marks by the artist known as Dave the Potter or David Drake, who made powerful stoneware pottery in the Edgefield District of South Carolina while enslaved by different owners.Īt the bottom of the pot are three marks that look like fingerprints, where someone - possibly Drake - dipped the pot into glaze. The speckled brown storage jar looks humble, even homely, from a distance - something you might find on a back porch in the South.
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