Theaster Gates’s latest exhibition at Gagosian is more than a display of contemporary ceramics; it is the culmination of a thirty-year dialogue with the legacy of David Drake. Known as "Dave the Potter," Drake was an enslaved man in 19th-century South Carolina who defied the era’s prohibitions by signing and incising poetry into his stoneware vessels. For Gates, finding Drake’s work as an undergraduate at Iowa State University in the early 1990s provided a necessary corrective to a curriculum then dominated by the "white Americana craft" of figures like Peter Voulkos and Rudy Autio.
The discovery, prompted by professor Ingrid Lilligren, offered Gates an "apparatus for believing" in his own practice. At a time when the history of American craft felt exclusionary, Drake served as an archetype—a "Black poet-potter" whose existence justified Gates’s own ambitions. This engagement has evolved from scholarly curiosity into a central pillar of Gates’s career, moving through a 2010 exhibition in Milwaukee toward the personal acquisition of an original Drake vessel in 2021.
At the heart of the current show is a work gifted to Drake’s descendants, a gesture that bridges the gap between historical erasure and modern recognition. By centering Drake’s lineage, Gates does not merely archive the past; he reclaims it as a living foundation for Black craftsmanship. The exhibition serves as a reminder that the history of American design is often found in the hands of those once denied a name, now finally given a permanent place in the canon.
With reporting from ARTnews.
Source · ARTnews
