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 — monumental alkaline-glazed jars, some capable of holding more than forty gallons, that bore couplets scratched into wet clay before firing. In a period when literacy among enslaved people was not only discouraged but in many Southern states explicitly criminalized, Drake's inscriptions constituted an act of extraordinary defiance. 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.
From archive to inheritance
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. The act of returning a ceramic object to a family line separated from it by slavery, commerce, and institutional collecting carries weight that extends beyond symbolism. It reframes the relationship between artist and predecessor not as one of influence alone but as one of obligation — an acknowledgment that the cultural capital generated by Drake's story has material consequences that ought to flow back toward the community from which it originated.
Gates's trajectory with Drake's legacy also mirrors a broader institutional reckoning within American craft history. For much of the twentieth century, the dominant narrative of studio ceramics in the United States traced a lineage from European and East Asian traditions through mid-century modernists, largely bypassing the contributions of enslaved and free Black artisans whose work sustained entire regional economies. The Edgefield district of South Carolina, where Drake labored, was one of the most productive stoneware centers in the antebellum South, yet its potters — many of them enslaved — occupied little more than footnotes in standard craft histories until relatively recent scholarship began to correct the record. Gates's sustained attention to Drake participates in that correction, but it does so from within the art market's most visible commercial infrastructure, lending the project a different kind of institutional force.
Craft, commerce, and the question of canon
Showing this body of work at Gagosian — among the most commercially powerful galleries in the world — introduces a productive tension. The gallery system that now elevates Drake's story is structurally descended from the same economies of taste and capital that once rendered his contributions invisible. Gates has long navigated this friction deliberately, using institutional access as a lever rather than treating it as a contradiction. His broader practice, which spans urban planning, archival projects, and community development on Chicago's South Side, suggests that gallery exhibitions function as one node in a larger strategy of redistribution — cultural and otherwise.
The exhibition serves as a reminder that the history of American design is often found in the hands of those once denied a name. Whether the art world's current appetite for such narratives represents a durable shift in how craft canons are constructed, or a cyclical moment of attention that will recede when market currents change, remains an open question. What is less ambiguous is the material gesture at the show's center: an object returned, a lineage acknowledged, a debt partially addressed. The distance between partial and full is where the harder work begins.
With reporting from ARTnews.
Source · ARTnews
