Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina

I am thrilled to announce that my ceramic works will debut in the upcoming traveling exhibition, Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. 

Focusing on the work of African American potters in the 19th-century American South, in dialogue with contemporary artistic responses, the exhibition presents approximately 50 ceramic objects from Old Edgefield District, South Carolina, a center of stoneware production in the decades before the Civil War. It will include monumental storage jars by enslaved and literate potter and poet David Drake alongside rare examples of the region’s utilitarian wares, as well as enigmatic face vessels whose makers were unrecorded.

Augmented by a scholarly publication, robust audio content, and new scientific research, Hear Me Now represents a critical contribution to the field of American art. It aspires to link past to present, in part by including the work of leading contemporary Black artists who have responded to or whose practice resonates with the Edgefield story, such as Simone Leigh, Adebunmi Gbadebo, Woody De Othello, Theaster Gates, and Robert Pruitt.

Exhibition Dates: September 9, 2022–February 5, 2023

Exhibition Location: The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 955, Robert Lehman Wing

Following the exhibition’s debut at The Met, it will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (March 6– July 9, 2023), the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor (August 26, 2023 – January 7, 2024), and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (February 16– May 12, 2024).

The exhibition is co-curated by Adrienne Spinozzi, Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts at The Met; Ethan Lasser, John Moors Cabot Chair of the Art of the Americas at the MFA; and Jason Young, Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. A group of artists and scholars were engaged in the planning of the exhibition.