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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue our series Black Art History with a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that interrogates the artistry of enslaved people and the legacy of industrial slavery and pottery. The show, titled, Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina is on display at the Met through this Sunday. The exhibition features approximately 50 ceramic objects from a part of South Carolina that was the center of stoneware production before the Civil War. It opens with a display of twelve pieces from one of Edgefield's most well-known artists, enslaved and literate potter David Drake, who often signed, dated, and sometimes carved poems on storage jars.

These pieces are also in conversation with the work of contemporary artists like Simone Leigh. A review in the Amsterdam News says, "The vessels bear witness to the joys, traumas, and lived experience of enslavement that echoed the prose of abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. These pieces testify to the lived experiences and material knowledge of the enslaved people in the area. Today, we're joined by the exhibition's curators. Adrienne Spinozzi is the assistant curator of American Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Adrienne, nice to meet you.

Adrienne Spinozzi: Hi, thanks for having us.

Alison Stewart: Ethan Lasser is the John Moore's Cabinet chair of Art of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts. Ethan, welcome.

Ethan Lasser: Thank you. Good to be here.

Alison Stewart: Jason Young is an associate professor of history at the University of Michigan. Nice to meet you, Jason.

Jason Young: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Alison Stewart: Adrienne, the show seems to be such a collaboration between all of these entities. As people heard, you're all from different institutions. What was the origin of the show?

Adrienne Spinozzi: Yes, thanks. Well, I'll just say that the genesis of the show dates back to 2017 when we were looking to tell some stories in the American wing at the Met here that haven't really been told, and I was in discussion with both Ethan and Jason early on about the development of this exhibition and bringing a regional story of Edgefield stoneware to a much larger national level and showing these objects and telling these stories to a much wider audience.

Alison Stewart: Ethan, what does the title, Hear Me Now, mean?

Ethan Lasser: Yes, Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina, is our way of signaling a change in narrative, of putting the voices, the histories, the lives, the experiences of the enslaved people first and not necessarily telling the story of the people who sign the pots, who are often their enslavers, the white factory owners, but rather foregrounding the many contributions of enslaved people.

Alison Stewart: Jason, the show opens with several creations made by an enslaved man, David Drake, sometimes known as Dave. What would you want people to know about Dave or David?

Jason Young: I think that he represents something of the expansive intellect and creativity and power of enslaved peoples, and we often think about the work that enslaved people did as the work of their brawn and their brow. They did physical, heavily demanding work, and that is certainly true, but one of the things that comes through in the work of Dave is just how intellectual and how artistic and how fine the work that he produced is, and it says something about the history of American slavery that we often don't get a chance to talk about.

Alison Stewart: Adrienne, I see you're nodding your head. Did you want to add something?

Adrienne Spinozzi: Yes, I'll just add and the fact that these documents survive because they're made in stoneware. The curators have talked a lot about how so much of the labor is in commodities that are consumed, so much enslaved labor, and Jason and Ethan and I have talked about this at length. But these are objects, these are tangible objects of this moment and this time that they're date averse and a signature of an enslaved person, and so it's so rare to have that and survive on an object that we can look at and understand.

Alison Stewart: Ethan, let's talk about Old Edgefield, this town in South Carolina. How did it become the center of stoneware production?

Ethan Lasser: Yes, well, it's on the western side of South Carolina, still there today, and it's on the watershed of the Savannah River. There's lots of clay, and the clay had been worked well before the story we tell by indigenous potters. The earliest object in our show is from the 16th century. Just it's an ancient tradition. It had clay, it had river, railroad, and it had a growing population of enslaved people, and that all supports this industry which is en-

Alison Stewart: We've lost Ethan. Ethan, you hold on. I'm going to Jason to ask you to pick up from where Ethan was left off.

Jason Young: I think he's back now.

Ethan Lasser: Yes, I was just saying, entirely contingent on the work of enslaved potters.

Alison Stewart: Jason if you would share a little bit about the population in the area. Who lived in the area? We've talked about enslave folks. Who else was in the area?

Jason Young: Edgefield, South Carolina is a really interesting place because in one way of accounting, it's a relatively small region, but it played an outsized role in the history of South Carolina. I've heard someone say that what South Carolina was to the south, Edgefield was to South Carolina. That it was in many ways the producer of an outsized number of congressional leaders, senators, governors, come from that region, and so it's an incredibly important, even if geographically small place in the history of South Carolina, and by that means, it's incredibly important for the history of the south.

Alison Stewart: Adrienne, do we know who the consumers of the pottery were?

Adrienne Spinozzi: Yes, it's a great question. We know that these objects really circulated within the region, and some as far east as Charleston. There was distribution within 150 miles radius, and we know that through advertisements and primary documents of the period, but it was everyday objects. This is your tupperware of the period. Stoneware, functional stoneware objects were used for everything, so food storage, food preparation, eating, drinking, and you see all forms and shapes and sizes in the objects in the exhibition.

Alison Stewart: We are talking about the exhibition Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina. The show is up at the Met until Sunday. I'm speaking with its curators, Adrienne Spinozzi, Ethan Lasser, and Jason Young. This may sound like an obvious question, Ethan. How have these pots survived?

Ethan Lasser: Yes, really good question. Part of the answer to that is their scale. The Dave pots are some 100-pound objects, and though we think of stoneware, of ceramics, that it's fragile, the porcelain vase that falls off your mantle. Stoneware is anything but, and in many ways they've survived through benign neglect. They've languished on porches and in fields. They've been found as planters and umbrella stands, and it's only in the last decades that people started to take an interest in their history.

Alison Stewart: Jason, can you imagine just coming along and seeing somebody sticking their umbrellas in one of these pots?

Jason Young: It's part of the story of this show. It's that there's this incredibly significant work that was regarded as insignificant because of the people who made it, and so that shift, that change from a largely discarded, disregarded art form to something that now has space and light and time to be considered more fully, it actually is a part of what's happening in the show.

Alison Stewart: Adrienne, also part of the show is about the economy, and it's about the industrialization of pottery and what that meant for enslaved people, what it meant for the area. What was the industry of pottery like and what did it mean for the people who made it?

Adrienne Spinozzi: Sure. One of the most important things that we're trying to get across, we're trying to press upon people and our visitors, is that pottery making is so labor intensive. It's so collaborative. There are so many steps involved. We're looking at these large pots that have the Dave signature, and we're looking at the objects in the interior part of the gallery, the unsigned, unrecorded objects. There are many other people involved in the production of these objects other than Dave.

Think about just the number of people involved to mine the clay, to make these objects. The mining of the natural resources in the area, including the trees, felling the trees and seasoning the wood so they could fire the kilns, and then, of course, the kiln production. These kilns were 105ft in length, and whenever I say that in a tour, I think it just clicks in people's minds that this is not a backyard kiln, this is not a few potters working together in a small shop, that it's production on an industrial scale, and all the adjacent laborers that supported the potters and then, of course, getting these objects to market, distributing throughout the region.

Knowing that there was 12 kiln sites in the area, that they were producing 9,000 gallons of clay per firing, it really gives a sense of the industrial nature of the stoneware industry there.

Alison Stewart: Ethan, and all of you can weigh in on this, as you were describing this, this is because you folks went to Edgefield, South Carolina as part of the research for this project. What questions were you asking? What did you want to know to be able to curate this show? Ethan, you want to start?

Ethan Lasser: Yes. We took five trips, even more to Edgefield over these last years, visiting some of the sites of the potteries, visiting collectors, visiting teachers. I think the question that was interesting to all of us is what does this history mean to the people of Edgefield today? What does it mean for Northern Museums, big old institutions like the Met and the MFA, the University of Michigan to tell a southern story? How did they want that story to be told to audiences who weren't regional, who weren't familiar with it?

Alison Stewart: Jason, how did those visits help shape this show?

Jason Young: It's been incredibly important. I think from the very beginning, we've been committed to an idea of disrupting the institutional authority that institutions like the University of Michigan or the Met or the MFA often have. We've wanted to democratize the curatorial process and to have more voices and more input and to talk to people, and it's evident in the show, it's evident in the audio guide that's associated with the show, and it's even evident in our curatorial practices. We've been trying to embrace a method that allows for more voices, more people. To be quite honest, that also introduces a little bit of conflict and tension, which we also have been interested in leaning into.

Alison Stewart: Adrienne, how about for you? What did those trips mean for you?

Adrienne Spinozzi: I'll just say that it was very important for us to have Old Edgefield in the title of the show because we're talking about a very specific place. These objects are from the earth, from the ground. They were made with labor, the enslaved people who occupied these lands. For us, we really wanted to put this place on the map, and we're hoping that anyone who is coming to see the show, they'll have a better understanding of this very particular place. It's not just stoneware history, it's not just craft history, we're not talking about Dave in particular, we're talking about American history.

Alison Stewart: Adrienne, most of the ceramics in the show are from the 19th century, but there's a piece from the 20th century, a potter named Earl Robbins. Can you tell us about Earl and this piece?

Adrienne Spinozzi: Sure. I think Ethan mentioned a little earlier, we really wanted to gesture to the longstanding potting traditions in this region. Of course, the area is very rich in natural resources. These clay deposits have been there for centuries. Next to the Woodlands cultures piece from 1500, we have this beautiful burnished unglazed [unintelligible 00:13:15] by contemporary Potter Earl Robbins from 2000. It shows these long-standing traditions of using the same clay pits, the same clay that his ancestors had used for generations previously. It was really important for us to acknowledge that the clay deposits had been used for centuries prior to Edgefield stoneware development, and of course, continues through today.

Alison Stewart: When we talk about continuing through today, Ethan, there are several modern pieces, including the exhibition, as I mentioned, Simone Lee. How are these pieces in conversation with the older pieces, the 19th century pieces?

Ethan Lasser: Yes. I'd answer that by going to Dave's words, to Dave's inscription from 1834, where he says on the pot, concatenation, which is the linking together of separate parts. In many ways, when you're in the gallery there in New York, you can feel the sparks flying between the artists of today and the artists of the 19th century. All these artists are just like us. They were building knowledge through their work about Edgefield, Simone and the other potters, and bringing out and I think amplifying parts of the story through their work. From the ties to the African diaspora, to the meaning of Dave's signature.

Alison Stewart: Jason, I was curious about the face jug jars. They're really, really striking. What was their purpose? I think people have seen them, and if not, go Google them now, everybody. They're really striking.

Jason Young: Yes. This is an incredibly important part of the show because, as we've been discussing, the ceramic production in the region was largely industrial. It was meant for utilitarian purposes, but by all accounts, the face vessel tradition is something that enslaved people did on their own time and of their own accord. That's a moment where you see people expressing themselves from their own hearts, their own cultural backgrounds. The uses of the items has been a point of discussion for quite some time. It's widely considered that these were used at least in part as spiritual and ritual objects.

It's not in any way a coincidence that many of the people who found themselves producing some of those face vessels in the late 19th century had arrived in South Carolina through the illegal trans-Atlantic slave trade. There were late shipments of captive Africans, even into the 1850s. Some of those people find themselves enslaved on these potteries. Part of what you're seeing there is an expression of African and African-American cultural traditions merging in the moment of Edgefield.

Alison Stewart: I want to mention the show ends its run at the Met this weekend, but it's going to travel to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in March. That's a good weekend trip for New Yorkers, if you miss it. Adrienne, what is a question you'd like people to consider as they walk through the exhibit?

Adrienne Spinozzi: That's a good question. I guess I want people to think about the conditions under which these objects were made and to put themselves in the place of the potters. We're not just talking about working in a pottery, but really the historic conditions. Our country, this is South Carolina, 1820 through 1870, it's right through the Civil War and then emancipation and really just understanding the circumstances under which this industry thrived.

Alison Stewart: Ethan, how about for you?

Ethan Lasser: I think I go to Dave and what it means to write as an act of resistance at a time when the laws were saying you couldn't be literate. We live in a moment, as we read today, when people are being silenced. What does it mean to resist through your own word, through your own voice, through your own writing?

Alison Stewart: Jason, for you?

Jason Young: I'd say, for me, I have and I hope to share with others a deeply spiritual connection with this material. As Adrienne mentioned before, many of the other products that enslaved people produced were consumed at the moment of creation. The tobacco was smoked, the sugar was consumed, the cotton was worn bare. But here's a product that has not only survived the period, but that in fact bears quite literally the fingerprints and the handprints of the makers. For me, it's a deeply important spiritual experience of communing with this material.

Alison Stewart: The name of the show is Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina. I've been speaking with its curators Adrienne Spinozzi, Ethan Lasser, and Jason Young. Thank you so much for spending time with us today.

Jason Young: Thank you.

Ethan Lasser: Thanks for having us.

Adrienne Spinozzi: Thanks for having us.

Alison Stewart: And that is all of it for today. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening, and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here next time.

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