Artwork: Ethically borrowed from the Dave the Potter Legacy Trust LLC, established for the benefit of the artist’s descendants. Photo: © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The jars created by David Drake possess a visceral weight, endurance, and strength of their own. Produced from the alkaline-glazed clay of Edgefield, South Carolina, around the middle of the 19th century, they are monumental pieces of engineering and expressions of defiant protest against oppression and subjugation. Drake – the enslaved African American potter whose name was Dave – did not limit himself to signing his work; he used these jars to create a body of literature, violating anti-literacy laws in the process.
For many years, the American museum community has been pursuing these jars, at first recognizing them as a curiosity and only later acknowledging them as works of fine American art. However, now the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has made a necessary and bold move: it has recognized the jars as stolen objects.
As part of a historic deal based on the morals and legalities of Holocaust reparations, the MFA has now handed ownership of two 1857 Drake pieces over to the descendants of the man who made them. It marks the first time that a respected museum has put the principles of returning looted art during the Nazi era into practice regarding items produced during American slavery without pay.
The details of the deal, worked out by the descendants’ lawyer, George Fatheree, are just as exacting as the cuts Drake made himself in the clay. One of the jars, with signature and date, will be loaned back to the Boston museum for at least two years. The other, the magnificent “Poem Jar,” purchased by the museum in 1997, has been bought back by the museum for an undisclosed price.
The “Poem Jar” is an outstanding example of strength and determination but also irony. This artifact has a text on it, stating that: “I made this Jar = for cash / Though its called Lucre trash.” It provides a sharp comment on the economy and labor of a person who had no right to earn money by selling it or any other items. It is impossible to hold this artifact today without feeling the weight of its entire history. As the chair of the art of the Americas at the museum, Ethan Lasser, mentioned correctly, Drake was the first owner of his creations, but at the same time, he had no choice concerning its fate and his pay.
This long-overdue act of justice affects other institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which have artifacts created by Drake in their possession. Modern artists are interested in the heritage of this craftsman; for instance, Theaster Gates recently donated one of Drake’s pots from his collection to the descendants.