… what it means to have and express agency while creating “art through coercion.”
On view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City until February 5th, 2023, Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield South Carolina features work from African American potters in the 19th-century. The exhibition features roughly 50 items of pottery and stoneware from the Old Edgefield District, a locale for stone masonry in the decades leading up to the Civil War.
Literate enslaved person David Drake, who was a poet as well as a potter, has a couple of storage jars in the collection. Many of his works come from Stony Bluff Manufactory. The collection also features the slightly mysterious face vessels, whose creators are unknown. These vessels speak for themselves, however, with their specific yet enigmatic style.
The uniqueness of this exhibition corroborates the skill, knowledge, and artistic agency of the enslaved people of the American South. Coupled with modern scholarship, this exhibition offers insight into what it means to have and express agency while creating “art through coercion.”
The exhibition features a catalogue and an audio guide to offer supplemental information on these materials. The audio guide is composed of dialogue from Black artists, scholars of African American history, an archaeologist, and even South Carolina’s own Tonya M. Matthews, CEO and President of the new International African American Museum in Charleston.
As one unnamed scholar says in the audio guide introduction, “When we don’t interrogate enslaved artisans in the same way we interrogate all of our other artisans and craftspeople, we lose a very big part of the story. Not just the story then, but the story that we’re living now.”
Visit the MET before February 5th, 2023, to hear this part of our very own South Carolina story.