In museum first, MFA Boston pairs prized vessels by Paul Revere and enslaved artist David Drake – The Art Newspaper – International art news and events

David Drake’s 1857 jar is moving from the margins of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, into the center of the museum’s early American story.

Beginning June 20, the vessel by the enslaved potter known as “Dave the Potter” will be installed in the first gallery of the MFA Boston’s reimagined 18th-century American art section, where it will sit beside Paul Revere’s 1768 “Sons of Liberty” silver bowl. The placement is part of the museum’s first full reinstallation of these galleries since 2010, timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the United States’ founding.

The pairing is deliberate. Both objects are inscribed by their makers, and both will be accompanied by recordings that activate as visitors approach them. Revere’s bowl honors 92 Massachusetts legislators who resisted British taxation and denounces the “insolent Menaces of Villains in Powers.” Drake’s jar, by contrast, carries a compact, wry verse: “I made this Jar for Cash- /though its called lucre trash.”

For Ethan Lasser, the MFA Boston’s chief of curatorial affairs and a Drake scholar, the new installation is meant to complicate the familiar narrative of the Revolution. Rather than centering only British rule and the triumph of independence, he wants the galleries to emphasize cultural exchange and “stories of interdependence — the way cultures depend on each other, are in conversation or in conflict.”

That shift is visible elsewhere in the galleries. Thomas Sully’s 1819 “The Passage of the Delaware,” with George Washington on horseback, appears near Alan Michelson’s 2024 stainless steel bust of Washington, “Hanödaga: yas (Town Destroyer),” by the Mohawk member of Six Nations of the Grand River. Its reflective surface returns the viewer’s own face, a quiet but pointed reminder that national memory is never neutral.

Drake’s presence in the main galleries also marks a change in status. For years, his work was shown in the museum’s folk and self-taught art gallery. The jar now enters a space long reserved for the canonical objects of early America, after being restituted to Drake’s heirs and re-acquired by the museum last autumn.

The result is more than a new display case. It is a reordering of the terms through which liberty, authorship, and belonging are seen in American art.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is making that argument in glass, silver, and clay — and asking visitors to hear the conversation between them.