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By Signing His Name to Massive Jars, This Enslaved Artist Defied Literacy Bans in the South. Now, His Masterpiece Is on View With a Famed Paul Revere Bowl
Key takeaways
- Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent
- Some 400 objects, including new acquisitions and long-unseen artifacts from North, Central and South America and the Caribbean will be available for public viewing beginning later this week.
- Drake’s jar was a product of the clay-rich American southeast.
Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent
Add as preferred source David Drake s 1857 ceramic jar is featured prominently in the museum s redesigned 18th-century galleries ahead of its America at 250 celebration. MFA Boston. A poem jar created by David Drake, a 19th-century African American potter who fashioned witty ceramics while enslaved in South Carolina, is one of the most prominent works on display at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MFA) ahead of America’s 250th birthday.
Housed for years in the folk art gallery of the museum, the 1857 jar now sits adjacent to the famed 1768 Sons of Liberty silver bowl, a piece Paul Revere made before the start of the Revolutionary War that has “been compared in importance to the Liberty Bell,” the Art Newspaper’s Jori Finkel reports.