Daisy Whitner, a retired account manager with a head for numbers, was always quick to hang up on strangers trying to sell something. But this call felt different.
The woman on the line, speaking softly, introduced herself as April Hynes and asked for Whitner’s parents’ and grandparents’ birth dates and birth places. Hynes already seemed to know their names. Then she started asking about Whitner’s great-grandparents.
“Hang up — it’s a scam,” Whitner’s husband urged. “Don’t give them any more information.”
But she waved him away, sensing that Hynes was after something more significant than a credit-card number. By the end of the call, Whitner understood that she was talking to a genealogist who specialized in the African diaspora.
And she learned something she had never imagined about herself: that she was a descendant of a 19th-century artist, David Drake, an enslaved African American potter working in the Edgefield district of South Carolina. Dave the Potter, as he was known, made ambitious stoneware jars now owned by great art museums across the United States.
“Daisy,” Hynes told her, “you are Dave’s great-great-great-granddaughter.”
Drake was especially remarkable, Whitner learned from Hynes, because he signed his name on his vessels and sometimes wrote short poems on them too. That he had learned to write at all defied anti-literacy laws of the time in South Carolina.
“This call was just a blessing,” Whitner, 87, recalled, speaking from the living room of a niece’s home outside Washington, D.C., on an unusually warm January day. “Because of slavery, so many African Americans don’t even know where to start,” she added. “We don’t know who our people are.”
Whitner sat between her younger sister Pauline and older sister Priscilla on a small sofa, with an open Bible and a pale speckled jar — a replica of Drake’s work — on the glass coffee table before her. The signature on the pot said “Dave” and was dated August 16, 1857. The cursive inscription in the clay read, faintly, “I wonder where is all my relation.”
Scholars tend to frame Dave’s poetic inscription as a raw expression of grief, made after his wife and children had been sold to other owners. His heirs — seven of whom were in the room — said they now read it as a question posed across generations, to which they are the answer.
“We are the relations,” Whitner’s 54-year-old nephew, Yaba Baker, said from across the table, describing the close-knit, faith-based family that included engineers and teachers. Most live in D.C. or its outskirts. Baker is a children’s book author and producer of “Just Like Me TV,” an earnest, animated series featuring young Black superheroes.
That phone call from Hynes, 10 years ago, was the start of the family’s journey to reconnect to their ancestor and his celebrated work, currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the de Young in San Francisco, among others. In 2021, a 25-gallon, four-handled stoneware “poem jar” by Drake brought $1.56 million at auction, a world record for American pottery.
And as the family has learned more about Drake’s work and its value, their educational journey has expanded into a quest for restitution: They are seeking to recover ownership of Drake’s ceramics from museum collections and private homes across the country. They believe these objects were essentially stolen from Drake — made under duress and sold or traded without his consent while he was enslaved.
They see Drake’s ambitious, alkaline-glazed storage jars as his artistic, spiritual and financial legacy — and their own.
No other heirs of enslaved artists have received this sort of restitution, and there is no obvious legal framework for it. While the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 governs the return of sacred objects to tribal members, and an international network of laws guides the return of cultural patrimony to countries of origin, nothing comparable supports the heirs of enslaved people.
But Drake’s descendants have been guided by their own sense of justice. Why, they wondered, do they own a replica of Drake’s pottery while so many others own the real thing?
Yaba Baker said the worst part is knowing that the heirs of Drake’s enslavers could still profit from his jars. “These pots are assets, and families are going to use them to build generational wealth or pass them down. And then our kids, who are actually relatives of Drake, are applying for student loans.
“It doesn’t make sense for this to continue. Why should this work benefit other families and not ours?”
Clay and Kinship
The family received the ceramic replica as a souvenir while attending a “Dave Day” celebration that Hynes helped to organize. It took place over a blistering hot weekend in July in the Edgefield area of South Carolina where Drake had lived, still known for its iron-rich red clay and glazed stoneware. Nearly 30 people, half of Drake’s known descendants, sweated in their Sunday best.
Whitner and her siblings knew they had enslaved ancestors from the region. They had heard an account, perhaps apocryphal, of their great-great-grandmother having to hold parasols for Confederate soldiers’ wives during the Civil War to protect them from stray ammunition.
The family learned more during the flurry of talks and pottery demonstrations marking Drake’s induction into the South Carolina Hall of Fame. They heard the rough outline of his life: He was born around 1801, died in the 1870s and took the surname of his first owner, Harvey Drake, after emancipation. Most of all they discovered his accomplishments in clay.
“It made me sad to learn about the conditions he had to work under,” Whitner said. “He was disabled, he had one leg, and had to make these huge pots that hold 20 or 30 gallons. He had to make these things sweating, for sure, in anguish,” she added. “But I also got caught up in the beauty of what he made.”
It is not clear how Drake learned to write, or who taught him to use the potter’s wheel. There is fierce debate over how he lost a leg, whether in a drunken accident as recounted in the groundbreaking book “Carolina Clay,” or, as scholars have recently suggested, as punishment for some perceived infraction.
But the inscribed pottery itself tells a clearer story, one of persistence and defiance. More than 200 of his signed jars survive today, with about 60 in institutions. For years these pieces were relatively affordable, traded mainly by small dealers in the South and collected by regional museums and ceramic buffs. Pots sometimes turned up on “Antiques Roadshow.”
Over the last decade, bigger art museums and collectors recognized Drake’s work as a window into American slavery from the enslaved person’s point of view, and started paying attention. Prices soared.
A “Roadshow” expert visiting Charleston in 2000 appraised one substantial Drake pot, inscribed “LM says this handle will crack,” for $6,000. It referred to Lewis Miles, an enslaver of Drake from about 1849 to 1865. In 2021 that pot, handle still intact, sold at auction for $420,000.
One scholar driving this interest is Ethan Lasser, head of curatorial affairs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 2010, he worked with the Chicago artist Theaster Gates on a project showcasing Drake’s pottery at the Milwaukee Art Museum; Gates also memorably wrote a hymnal about Drake, drawing from his poems and bringing in a gospel choir to perform the songs. When Lasser joined MFA Boston, he came with plans for a Drake exhibition, which became the important traveling survey “Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina.”
The family wasn’t consulted during the making of the show, but they received an invitation to attend its first stop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in September 2022. More than a dozen family members came to New York for the V.I.P. preview and mingled with collectors and curators who specialize in pottery, over the sounds of violins.
Entering the gallery, Yaba Baker was struck by the “magnitude of the exhibition,” with a title panel that was taller than 18 feet. “The sign was humongous. I’m a tall guy, so for it to be three times my height is something.”
He saw 12 of Drake’s vessels alongside those of his still-anonymous contemporaries, expertly lit like the classical Greek and Roman amphoras on the first floor. Drake’s jars are often striking in size, but here they also seemed brilliant as objects, capturing the play of light with their glistening green or golden streaks and speckled brown surfaces.
“That’s when we got the idea of how important Dave was,” Baker recalled.
Baker lingered near the centerpiece: a monumental jar with a typical Drake flourish — a couplet riffing on its daily function. “A very large jar which has 3 handles/pack it full of fresh meats — then light candles,” the inscription says. Baker learned it had been bought by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art for $1.56 million.
A collector who owned three pots asked Baker if the family owned anything by their ancestor. Nothing, Baker said.
Chains of Ownership
By the time the show reached the MFA Boston in March 2023, Lasser’s team had made an emotional short film interviewing the family elders as part of the exhibition.
“I felt like it was an important moment to share their story and what it means that this artist had descendants,” Lasser said. “It also allowed us to open the question about chains of ownership.”
He was referring to the object’s provenance. Sometimes provenance is simple: a painting passes down from original artist to ultimate heirs through generations. Sometimes the chain of ownership is broken, as in the case of art looted by the Nazis, where a work was stolen or a family forced to sell and heirs have legal recourse to recover it.
In Drake’s case, as the Boston museum acknowledged in a wall label, the chain of ownership was “broken” from the start because the potter made the work while enslaved and had no control over when, or how, or for how much, the work was sold. The work was, the label said, “conceptualized and created under duress.”
Pauline Baker, Yaba’s mother and a retired speech pathologist, said this broken chain has consequences. “The saying in the U.S. is pull yourself up by your bootstraps. When they freed the slaves, we had no boots.”
As Yaba Baker pointed out, “It’s like two injustices. It’s like you enslaved the man, and then you enslaved the very thing that he made for generations to come. So when does it stop?”
The issue came up again on the family’s next trip to Boston, for an event that brought together scholars, artists and exhibition lenders shortly after the museum opening. When a round of official speeches failed to address the ownership issue, a Massachusetts potter, Mark Shapiro, spoke up during the question-and-answer section.
“How does the family feel about these objects being sold and benefiting other people economically?” he asked. “It doesn’t seem right to me.”
The crowd fell silent. Many turned to Baker for an answer. He explained that he was a member of a big family and that they would need to get on the same page before he could say.
He organized a family video call with six of his cousins, who had just begun meeting to discuss their priorities before running plans up to their elders for approval. “My goal was to make sure everything had buy-in and everyone knew what we were doing and why,” Baker said.
They agreed to hire a lawyer. The idea was to “start a process, thinking if we don’t get anything out of it, at least our kids will. Or our grandkids will,” he said.
Pursuing ‘Ethical Restitution’
George Fatheree tends to work faster than that. A Harvard-educated lawyer in Los Angeles, Fatheree made a splash in 2022 by successfully negotiating the return of Bruce’s Beach, oceanfront land south of the city that had been seized in the 1920s from a Black couple through eminent domain. The County of Los Angeles agreed to return this property to the couple’s heirs, who sold it back to the county for $20 million.
“I don’t think there’s ever been an instance when a museum has applied principles of ethical restitution to artwork created by enslaved Americans,” Fatheree recalled. “So my mind started racing.”
The MFA Boston was a natural place to start, given the museum’s history with other sorts of restitutions. They even have, rare in the field, a full-time “curator for provenance.” “My thinking was that I’d need a really good thought partner,” Fatheree said.
Last October, after months of conversation, the MFA Boston agreed to return two of Drake’s jars in its collection, recognizing the family’s newly established Dave the Potter Legacy Trust as the legal owner. The contract was modeled on the return of Nazi-looted artistic works.
Fifteen family members made one last visit to Boston in November to receive the pots in a small signing ceremony. “It was exhilarating, validating,” recalled Pauline Baker, mother of Yaba, who with her octogenarian siblings posed for photos around a large-rimmed pot with splotchy glaze. “I didn’t think this would happen in my lifetime, especially given the current moment.”
Her sister Daisy reached deep inside the pot and touched a rough patch that felt like a thumbprint or fingerprint. She could sense Drake’s “large hands” shaping the clay. “It was like I could feel the sweat and tears falling from his face,” she said, overcome with emotion herself.
As part of the agreement, the museum bought back one of the vessels for a price that both parties have described as fair-market value. Experts put that around $1 million.
This jar features a pointed comment on the fruits of his labor: “I made this jar for cash/though it’s called lucre trash,” Drake wrote.
The second jar, also owned by the family, has been lent back to Boston for two years, keeping it in the public sphere.
“We want Dave’s work to be seen as much as possible,” said Yaba Baker, who is planning to make a time-travel animated series about his ancestor and has already designed some Dave the Potter “Brilliance & Resistance” T-shirts.
No family member wanted a pot that valuable in their living room. Some worried about children; others, cats. “We all agreed that maintaining a pot that’s 175 years old is a special skill. And we don’t have that skill,” Baker said.
A Gift and a Plinth
He hopes other museums and collectors will step forward and return their pots to the Legacy Trust, which is governed by the four oldest siblings with one cousin and benefits all five lines of heirs equally. Benefits extend to anyone else who can establish they too are descendants of Drake.
Art museums are notoriously loath to part with prized possessions. But Fatheree said he is currently in conversation with half a dozen institutions. Independently, Theaster Gates, who championed Drake for so long, is set to announce this week his gift to the family of the one Drake jar in his possession, acquired in 2021 at auction. To mark the occasion, Gates has planned a small show at Gagosian’s location at 821 Park Avenue, “Dave: All My Relations,” opening March 26. It will feature Drake’s “humble” work, Gates said, on a plinth made from his own pulverized ceramics.
“He was an ordinary dude making objects for ordinary people — squarely in the zone of pickles, fermentation, beer, storage,” Gates said on a recent video call with Yaba Baker.
Gates, who has gone so far as to sign his own pots “Dave/Theaster,” doesn’t use the term “restitution” because he doesn’t consider himself an art collector.
“This object represents an opportunity for joy transference,” the artist said. “It’s not legal, it’s not political, it’s like, I’ve been waiting for you. I’ve been holding this for you.”
In effect it’s a handoff from Drake’s artistic heir to his actual heirs. Baker said the family was “over-the-top grateful” for the gift.
Baker, who is driving to New York with two cousins for the gallery opening, said he has enjoyed spending more time with Drake’s descendants. “We used to get together for Christmas or Thanksgiving, but we now have reason to spend a lot of time together — and we actually really like each other,” he said.
In this way the “Dave” jars that have been traded, auctioned and exhibited — dispersed across the country — have brought a family whose ancestors were forcibly separated closer together.
The post Their Ancestor Was an Enslaved Potter. They Are Battling to Recover His Legacy. appeared first on New York Times.
