[Reverb Effect’s theme music, lively and interrogative, plays behind the voice of a narrator, interspersed with historical clips of other voices]
Narrator [a woman’s voice]: How do past voices resonate in the present movement?
Man A: …hear the stories of your parent’s…
Woman A: yeah
Man A: …and your grandparents’ and stuff, so I’m living through them or the stories they told.
Narrator: And how do we make sense of those voices?
Woman B: No, and that’s the story of my life [echo]
Man B: And a case has been made!
Woman B: No I am not trying to void the question, I am trying to clarify the position…
Narrator: What were they trying to say? And whose job is it to find out? This is Reverb Effect.
[Intro theme slowly fades out]
[Music slowly fades in]
Paige Newhouse: Sugar. Tobacco. Cotton. These products are synonymous with the history of American slavery.
[Music slowly fades out]
Paige Newhouse: But what about woodcraft, fiber arts, and ceramics? Stoneware produced by the enslaved potters of Edgefield, South Carolina, are among the few remnants of goods manufactured by enslaved people left to this day. These pots are intricate, sturdy, and embody the extremely difficult and skilled labor that went into their production. They are also works of art. The vessels and the potters who made them are the focus of Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina, a temporary exhibit in fall 2023 at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Hear Me Now gives nuance to our understanding of the labor carried out by enslaved people and, in turn, the history of American slavery. Not all of the jugs and objects that the potters in Edgefield produced were sold. Some were created for personal use, such as the face vessels inspired by West Central African art, religion, and culture. Other pieces were engraved with the poetry and writings of their makers—at a time when such literacy was illegal.
Hear Me Now raises questions about art produced under extraordinarily violent conditions and the curation of this work in the present. How do museum curators treat this art? How do curators approach ownership and reciprocity? To what extent do they include its historical background in the exhibit? And how is the audience engaging with this history?
Welcome to Season 5 of Reverb Effect, a podcast brought to you by the History Department at the University of Michigan. I’m Paige Newhouse, this year’s season producer. In this episode, I talk with Jason Young, co-curator of Hear Me Now and a professor in the U-M Department of History. He spoke with me about Edgefield pottery, the reparative work of the exhibit, and the historical research behind it.
[Sounds from a pottery studio slowly fade in]
Paige Newhouse: You are hearing sounds from a local ceramics studio in Ann Arbor. Pottery looks very difficult to make, even with the modern conveniences of electric pottery wheels, electric kilns, lighting, and air conditioning…
[Sounds from etching on the clay]
[Sounds from a pottery studio slowly fade out]
Paige Newhouse: Enslaved potters in Edgefield did not have modern technology. They worked under coercive and violent conditions.
Jason Young: It was really quite extensive and fairly complicated. Again, we think about and we focus on the pots themselves, but the work that went into producing these pots was really quite remarkable. As it happens, this region of South Carolina is home to some pretty vast woodlands. That was incredibly important because it was the trees in those woodlands that were felt by enslaved workers, by and large, to feed the kilns that then produced a lot of this pottery. African Americans were there working the kilns. Reading these firings, reading the flame in these firings over long periods of time, they were mining the clay, preparing and refining the clay. And then lastly, producing these works of pottery. And in some ways, the potters were the last people to have their hands in the process, but it took quite a bit even to get the clay onto the wheel.
Paige Newhouse: One of the most widely known potters featured in the exhibition is David Drake.
Paige Newhouse: Briefly, could you explain who Dave is?
Jason Young: Dave is one of the potters who is featured in this show. He’s received a lot of well-earned attention for a number of reasons. First is that he was a master potter. He was incredibly well known during the period that he was working. And his pots were widely sought out. They were highly desired during the period because he made these masterful pots of tremendous size and scale, and not everyone could do that, then, or now. When I talked to contemporary ceramicists, when I talked to contemporary potters about the things that Dave was producing, they are in awe at the fact that he could produce these massive vessels. So if it were just for that, for the artistry and the skill of creating these vessels, that would be enough to deserve attention. But in addition to that, he was literate.
He signed and dated many of the pots that he produced. Not only did he sign them and date them, but he also wrote on some of the pots, these poetic couplets, these poems. The poems themselves are kind of biting assessments of the slave system, but a kind of criticism that also bears the mark of a kind of dark humor, a skill and artistry that allows him to critique the system while also giving some little bit of wiggle room to the reader that maybe he’s not saying what he’s saying—there are brilliant examples of it in the show.
But one other thing, and this might be particularly interesting to historians of the nineteenth century and earlier, and it’s something that we have to explain, I have to explain this to younger visitors as well—I’m teaching a class devoted to the show, and I had to explain this to undergrads—one of the things that’s remarkable about Dave’s inscribed and etched pots is that he has a masterful hand. That is to say his penmanship, his writing, shows the evidence of real skill. And in the nineteenth century, of course, that’s not a small thing that your hand, your penmanship, the skill of your hand, of your writing, is a thing to be remarked on. And it’s not at all uncommon during the nineteenth century for people to assume that they can read into your internal character through your handwriting, that they can read the character of a thief or the character of a liar, that they can read class into one’s handwriting. And so the fact that he writes with a masterful hand is also an indication to me that clay is not the only thing he’s writing on. He clearly is writing on paper and has had a lot of practice at developing a really strong hand. Again, we don’t have any evidence or scraps of that paper, yet that we know of, but it’s clear that he’s masterful as a communicator and as a writer. And in that way, I put him in the same category that one would include any other members of the African American writerly tradition. I think he deserves a place among all of them.
Paige Newhouse: Yeah. What I got from some of his writings was that he showed kind of an awareness of the future in a way.
Jason Young: Oh, wow.
Paige Newhouse: Like when I was reading that, I was like—wow—I don’t know. He just knows that the system’s gonna be crumbling and this is gonna be left.
Jason Young: Paige, this is one of the conversations we’ve been having about Dave, which is: who is he, who is he writing to? And there is a way that he’s writing to the future. There is that sense in some of the pots that he’s writing to the future. One of the most hilarious lines that he has—and it’s not a pot that’s included in the show, so I feel terrible about mentioning this, about teasing this object and not allowing people an opportunity to see it—but at one point in his life, Dave was owned by a man named Louis Miles, and right along the handle of one of his pots, he writes: “Louis Miles says, this handle will crack.”
And the pot exists intact. More than 150 years later, Dave is still winning that argument. And you can imagine that he had an argument, had a discussion with Lewis Miles about whether or not this handle had been made correctly and whether or not it would survive the firing in the kiln, or whether or not it would break soon after. And he writes the evidence of that argument onto the handle of this pot: Lewis Miles says, this handle will crack. And he’s winning that argument every day.
[Music fades in]
Paige Newhouse: The vessels that the Edgefield potters made have traveled far. They accompanied African Americans during the Great Migration from the rural South to the industrial cities in the North.
[Music fades out]
Paige Newhouse: In the recent past, many of these vessels have been purchased by wealthy art collectors for their own personal collections and for future sale. I asked Professor Young what it meant for art collectors to have Edgefield pottery.
Jason Young: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting and also a complicated question. It’s a really good question. For the vast majority of the time that this material was made, like when it was made during the nineteenth century, most of it, much of it was used for utilitarian purposes. Like I said, it was meant to help make the plantation engine go. These objects were very critical in that way. And of course, this is a time before refrigeration. It’s a time before plastics become the main ways for storing food and liquids. So most of what people ate on or drink from—or how they stored their food—that would’ve been in ceramics. It would’ve been in pottery. So it was very important to the plantation regime in the post-slave period. A lot of this material was disregarded or discredited, certainly as the kind of subjects of art collectors. People really weren’t interested in this material in that way.
It really isn’t until you get to—and it depends on how you count—but it really isn’t until you get to the 1970s that this material starts to be amplified and elevated as artistic material that’s worthy of serious consideration. There had been some intrepid collectors and scholars earlier than that, but it’s really the 1970s where this material starts to take off. And it does mean that there has been a kind of movement of this material from the South, from the plantation regime, into institutions and private collectors’ hands. And part of what we’re trying to do with the show is think about what we’ve called broken chains of ownership, and think about what it means to repair the relationships between these objects and the people who originally made them.
There are no conclusions and there’s certainly no easy solutions when it comes to that question. One of the important things that we do is acknowledge that these chains of connection and ownership have been broken. I think that’s an important start as a way of thinking about ways to heal and mend. Another thing that we’ve done is we’ve invited a whole range of people—activists, artists, ceramicists, academics—to come into the circle of the conversation. The curatorial team, which includes myself, Adrian Spinozzi at the Met, and Ethan Lasser at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, we’ve never imagined our role as authoritative. We don’t imagine ourselves as taking an authoritative curatorial role. Instead, we want to open the space for a conversation. One of the people who we’ve talked with rather extensively on this project, and who’s also a part of the audio guide that’s connected to the show, is a ceramicist and potter named David Mack. And one of the things he’s trying to do is put legislation in front of Congress that would establish what would in effect be a fee or a tax that anytime this material is bought and sold in the open market, this fee or tax would be established and then held, and then used either for arts education in Edgefield, South Carolina, or for restitution and repair of descendant communities or something like that. So we’ve been actively involved in conversations about what it means to repair here.
Paige Newhouse: Do you think that this exhibit has changed or is at least advancing a conversation, in how Western museums are thinking about collections, especially collections of art or objects that have been taken from people or created under violent circumstances?
Jason Young: I think the museum world is having to face these questions, full stop, right now as it relates to a whole range of things. And some of the listeners may be aware that there are active conversations in the news right now about Benin bronzes and other works of African art and the relationships between the Met and the British National Museum that are holders of this material. What are their responsibilities and what are their obligations to return this material? So I think museums are having this conversation, full stop. There are on the books, and in certain areas, legislation that helps guide museums and really obliges museums to change their practices in certain ways. So, for example, native American materials are controlled and protected under NAGPRA, and that means that museums are bound to treat indigenous and native objects in a particular way.
Paige Newhouse: NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, is a federal law that requires the repatriation and disposition of Native American cultural artifacts by federal agencies and institutions receiving federal funding.
Jason Young: Very similar laws are in place to protect materials that were taken from Jewish families during the Holocaust. And so there’s legislation about holocaust restitution and repair and return. Those things are very clear, and museums have a kind of protocol for how to deal with those materials. When it comes to things that enslaved people produced, it’s much more complicated, in part because there is no kind of legal basis for how we are to treat this material. And there are no obligations or protocols yet established. So the issue is, at this point, a moral and an ethical one, not yet a legal one, but NAGPRA and Nazi-era restitution also began as moral and ethical questions before they became legal ones. So I do imagine a time in the relatively near future—I may be optimistic there—but I do imagine a time where materials like this will come under some sort of legislative protection. I don’t know exactly what that would look like, but I can imagine a time in the not too distant future where we have some kind of guidance in the law about how to handle this material.
[Music fades in]
Paige Newhouse: Hear Me Now stands out to me as an art exhibit because of its powerful engagement with history. I asked Professor Young what research curators and collaborators conducted behind the scenes.
[Music fades out]
Paige Newhouse: And what is the research that goes behind putting together this exhibit?
Jason Young: I’ve been meaning—I’ve been hinting at this for a while. So it’s interdisciplinary in a lot of ways. There is historical research that would be very familiar to historians’ archival research about the nature and history of this industry in, in Edgefield, South Carolina. There’s archeological research that’s required to try to determine the places and locations and nature of these pottery sites—that’s been very important. We’ve had chemists on the field in our conversations to try to think about what we can learn about the soil and soil samples and things like that. It also been incredibly important for us to have contemporary artists to try to imagine what it might have meant to create some of these objects under duress in South Carolina in July. That’s also been really important to us. And so for us, the research has really been about gathering expertise when and where we find it, and whether that’s academic expertise, artistic expertise, or even community activists who’ve been incredibly important to us as we’ve developed the project have been really crucial.
Paige Newhouse: The historian in me wanted to know more about the archival research behind the exhibit. What documents and other kinds of materials did curators examine?
Jason Young: One of the things that we’ve found is that many of the pottery owners are keeping records about the nature and operation of the potteries. So we have that as a record. The state of South Carolina was deeply interested in supporting the ceramic industry during the nineteenth century. And so there are documents that the state produced. They provided a significant amount of seed money to some of the early potters. And so they had a vested interest in trying to find and develop industry in the state. So there are documents that bear that out. At the same time, we have some anecdotal evidence that comes to us in scraps and pieces, as is often the case, through newspapers, journalists, oral histories, that come both during the period and especially after the period. So we’re piecing together all of that kind of historical material to paint a larger picture of what life might’ve been like in Edgefield during the time.
[Music fades in]
Paige Newhouse: Meandering through Hear Me Now, visitors find a bowl made with clay from what would become the Edgefield area. They see face jugs connected to enslaved people from the Kongo region, who were illegally brought to Georgia and later South Carolina after the slave trade had ended. At the end of the exhibit, they find art made by contemporary American artists like Simone Leigh, who created a piece inspired by the work of Edgefield potters. What stood out to me the most was the focus on people in this exhibit, such as the interviews with David Drake’s descendents.
I spoke with some visitors about what they thought of the collection.
[Music fades out]
[Museum fade in]
Paige Newhouse: Was there anything surprising that you learned from the exhibit?
Interview 1: I didn’t know how much, you know, the craftsmanship was a part of these enslaved people’s daily lives. They were really monumental pieces and—you know—their size and scale. It just was another facet of what their lives would look like that I don’t think I had visibility into before.
Interview 2: Like, just like the uses of pottery. Like to me it’s always just been like ceramics class in art class, but actually seeing the use of and impact and meaning of pottery in Black culture was really interesting.
[Museum fade out]
Paige Newhouse: Museum curation is a way for historians to engage with the public, to share their research with broader audiences. I ran into the security guard, Andrew, who sees how visitors experience the exhibit first-hand. He had some insights…
[Museum fade in]
Paige Newhouse: You just talked about public engagement. Where is the public engagement in this exhibit?
Andrew: Primary public engagement in this exhibit is the Hear Me Now part where the museum patrons have the ability to come in and express themselves in writing or in drawings, basically to just show how they feel towards the exhibit and basically towards life in general.
One of the cards that we have, done by a member of the public, is “See the beautiful in everything.” Another card reads, “Wishing for peace and strength for our loved ones. Always be kind. You never know someone else’s situation.”
[Museum fade out]
[Music fade in]
Paige Newhouse: Back at the studio, I asked Professor Young about what he wanted audience members to take from the exhibit.
[Music fade out]
Paige Newhouse: I don’t wanna take up too much of your time, but whenever I teach or whenever I’m writing, I’m thinking: what’s a takeaway? Like, what are the takeaways from this? And I think this exhibit has so many, but, if you could say what you would want the audience to take away, what would that be?
Jason Young: I think there are two things. One answer—it’s not a cop out, I’m being honest, it’s an honest answer, but you might think it’s a cop out—that’s one answer. But then I have another one, which is maybe a little bit more practical.
The cop out answer, which I do believe in sincerely, is that it was really important for the curatorial team to create a show that didn’t have one conclusion—that was open-ended. And so when people come to see the show, I hope that they get that. I hope that they come away with a range of responses and a range of reactions. The show is emotional at times, but it doesn’t pull simply one heartstring. You know, one has space in, in the exhibition to celebrate, to mourn, to imagine—there’s all kinds of possibilities for how you come out of that show. And I think that’s what we were really aiming for, is to create a show that can manufacture all kinds of responses and outcomes. So that’s one answer.
The other answer is that—and I’m talking specifically now to historians—is about the power of doing site-specific research. Edgefield is a very small place. It’s a very small place, and it’s not the state capital of South Carolina. It’s not Charleston, which receives a lot more attention. It’s a very small place, but it’s a small place that had an incredibly outsized influence. Edgefield produced more than ten South Carolina governors in the lead up to the Civil War. Edgefield, South Carolina, was one of the hotbeds of the secession movement. After the Civil War, it was the heart of the southern segregationist ideology. And you know, I’ve heard it said before that Edgefield was to South Carolina, what South Carolina was to the South. And so it’s a really small place, but if you look at it closely and deeply and spend time there, it provides a real wealth of understanding about what the history of the South was. The history of the Confederacy and the history of its aftermath can be gleaned from what otherwise is a kind of relatively small place on the map, but incredibly important historically and culturally.
[Music fade in]
[Music fade out]
Paige Newhouse: There are many people who contributed to this episode. First, thank you to Professor Jason Young for speaking with me. Thank you to the University of Michigan Museum of Art and the Yourist Pottery Studio in Ann Arbor for letting us record, and to all who kindly participated in short interviews. Thank you to Elizabeth Collins for her work in this episode.
Our editorial board is Amir Marshi, Ennrieth Martinez Palacios, Talitha Pam, Cheyenne Pettit, and Sophie Wunderlich. Gregory Parker is our executive producer, and I’m your host and season producer, Paige Newhouse. Please join us for our next episode, for more stories about how the past reverberates into the present. This is Reverb Effect.
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