The artist Theaster Gates honours the legacy of the enslaved ceramicist David Drake, also known as Dave the Potter, in his new exhibition Dave: All My Relations at Gagosian’s Park Avenue space in New York. The show is anchored by two vessels by Drake, including one work that was returned to Drake’s descendants by the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) Boston last year in a groundbreaking restitution agreement. The other vessel comes from Gates’s personal collection and will also be returned to Drake’s descendants.
Drake was born around 1800 in Edgefield, South Carolina, and died around 1874. Throughout his life, he created striking alkali-glazed stoneware with clay sourced from the Edgefield area, and signed and etched many of his works with writings and poems despite laws that prohibited enslaved people in the state from reading and writing.
Gates pulverised 45 pots from his studio—works created for previous exhibitions that he kept and knew would not enter the market—to create a ceramic and concrete aggregate plinth to display the Drake vessel from his collection. The gesture aims to do a “poetic justice” to the work by placing Drake’s artistic legacy above his own.
“The conceptual attempt was to not make pots that demonstrate my ceramic prowess but break my pots to celebrate this beautiful object that Dave made,” Gates tells The Art Newspaper. “To sacrifice my vessels is very much an offering to Dave and his family. It’s a very small gesture, but having this contract with Dave’s family—and just having a moment where the public can bear witness to this exchange—feels like the right kind of exhibition for me right now.”
Gates began communicating with Drake’s family last year after receiving a call from the lawyer overseeing their restitution claims, George Fatheree. Before the return of the works from the MFA Boston last year, Fatheree claims that no museum had ever resolved a restitution claim for works taken under the conditions of slavery in America.
“I quickly explained that I wasn’t interested in giving them the work from some institutional or racially motivated place. I was interested in sharing the work back with them as a gift,” Gates says. “I was excited to give it back from a position of artistic and familial right. We have been in direct conversation for the last year thinking about how we can best honour Dave, the family and our commitment to each other.”
Gates first became interested in Drake’s work in 2008 while studying ceramics under Ingrid Lilligre, who introduced him to a 1998 exhibition about Drake at the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. This encounter sparked his enduring interest in Drake’s work, how it persisted despite systemic erasure and how it shaped a lineage of Black material culture.
Gates collaborated with the curator Ethan Lasser for the exhibition To Speculate Darkly: Theaster Gates and Dave the Potter at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2010, which explored Drake’s life and practice through his vessels and other multimedia works. Drake’s descendants were unknown until six years after this exhibition, when a genealogist researching Drake’s lineage was able to track down members of the family. When Lasser organised the traveling show Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2022-23, Drake’s descendants were brought into the narrative as consultants.
The vessel restituted from the MFA is a jar made in 1857 that is inscribed: “I wonder where is all my relation.” The statement poignantly references what scholars believe was Drake’s forced separation from a woman thought to be his wife and her two sons. The vessel from Gates’s collection dates to around the same time; Gates acquired it at auction in 2021.
“What I knew before I bought it was that it didn’t have a poetry couplet. Instead, it was just Dave’s name, beautifully incised, with a year and date,” Gates says. “The pot was very humble—one of the smaller pots within the collection of Dave’s works. A collector would probably not call this the exceptional life work of Dave. It was an everyday pot made by a great potter.”
The exhibition at Gagosian also includes works made between 2008 and 2009 that give context to Gates’s engagement with Drake’s work, and a large alkali-glazed pot made using techniques, materials and finishes similar to those Drake utilised.
“My practice has always been interested in the ways that history hides, or seems like it hides, but it’s right there in our face. All we have to do is really look for the things that inspire us,” Gates says. “Dave was so much of an inspiration to me but, over the years, my career was the one that grew as a result of talking about Dave and his history. With this exhibition, Dave is the headline—the main protagonist.”
Theaster Gates, Dave: All My Relations, 26 March-2 May, Gagosian, 821 Park Avenue, New York
