North Carolina–based artist Jim McDowell, who along with Arai is contributed to the show by design gallery Tiwa Select, radically revamps historical forms for the present with his ‘face jugs’. Styled after earthenware vessels once made by enslaved and newly-freed people of African descent in the Americas—including by his own four-times great aunt Evangeline—the jugs are thought to have been used variously for funerary, grave marking, and spiritually protective purposes. For years, McDowell pointed out, the jugs were appropriated as a vernacular Southern ‘folk art’ by white people, something he witnessed first hand as the only Black person in a ceramics class in 1980. McDowell reclaims this agentic form. “These face jugs speak of a larger implication beyond the form of this vessel,” he said. “They tell stories; they evoke emotions that have long been locked up; they unleash what has been locked up inside them and what has been locked up inside me.”
About two decades ago, while working on the face jugs McDowell discovered the story of a man known as ‘Slave Potter Dave’, who could read and write and engraved his stoneware with messages now lost to time. “In the face of adversity and under the risk of severe punishment, this slave potter created jugs with rebellious sayings on them,” McDowell noted. His vessels bear writing too, with quotes from thinkers and leaders “presenting us with knowledge to live a better life,” including Frederick Douglass and Maya Angelou, along with contemporary messages like ‘BLM’, ‘LOVE TRUMPS HATE’, and ‘SILENCE IS BETRAYAL’ on their backs. “The jugs,” McDowell explained, “speak for me and for my ancestors.” Along with the words they carry, their potency derives in part from their contorted faces that attract and repel. While historically such objects might have warded off devilish spirits, today they invoke and reject presences no less evil: “I make no excuse for the horror that I portray in my jugs. They are ugly because slavery is ugly. In order for us to move forward into a better future we must face the past no matter how uncomfortable it makes us feel.”
In the study, some of McDowell’s sculptural jugs—including the virtuosic and haunting Door of No Return, which features figures set into a stage-like void within the amphora—share a credenza with Masaomi Yasunaga’s otherworldly, abstract Tokeru Utsuwa, or Melting Vessels. These amalgamations of bits of clay suspended like found stones in layers upon layers of pure glaze cohere into something like archaeological artifacts dredged from the ocean long after humans have disappeared, sort of beautiful last testaments of the anthropocene. Perhaps, in this house of glass and stone, a living marker to its mid-century moment, tucked away on forested land, nothing could be more appropriate: hand-crafted ruins, indices of deep legacies and deep-times, of humanity’s lasting impact on the earth and one another, reminders that though things always change, one can’t escape the resonance of history.
At The Noyes House: Blum & Poe, Mendes Wood DM and Object & Thing is on show through November 28th, 2020.
All further viewing slots are currently booked, so take a virtual tour below.
Words by Drew Zeiba
Photography by Michael Biondo