Theaster Gates Builds a Gagosian Exhibition Around Two Rare Vessels by Enslaved Potter David Drake
A single line incised into a 19th-century jar — “I wonder where is all my relation” — is setting the emotional temperature for a new exhibition by American artist Theaster Gates at Gagosian’s Park Avenue space in New York. Titled “Dave: All My Relations,” the show places the work and legacy of David Drake (c. 1800–c. 1874), the enslaved South Carolina ceramicist known as Dave the Potter, at its center, with Gates positioning himself as custodian rather than protagonist.
The exhibition is anchored by two vessels by Drake. One is a jar made in 1857 that the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston returned to Drake’s descendants last year through a restitution agreement that has been described as a landmark in the US context. According to George Fatheree, the attorney overseeing the family’s restitution claims, no museum had previously resolved a restitution claim involving objects taken under the conditions of slavery in America.
The second vessel comes from Gates’s personal collection — and, in a parallel gesture, will also be returned to Drake’s descendants. Gates acquired the jar at auction in 2021; it dates to roughly the same period as the MFA Boston work.
Drake’s ceramics have long held a singular place in American material culture. Born around 1800 in Edgefield, South Carolina, and believed to have died around 1874, he produced alkali-glazed stoneware using local clay. Many of his vessels are signed and inscribed with poems or statements, a remarkable fact given that South Carolina law prohibited enslaved people from reading and writing. Scholars have read Drake’s inscriptions as both personal testimony and a quiet defiance embedded in utilitarian form.
Gates’s most striking intervention in the show is not a new body of pots, but an act of subtraction. To elevate the Drake vessel from his own collection, he pulverized 45 ceramic works from his studio — pieces made for earlier exhibitions that he had kept and did not expect to enter the market — and used the fragments to create a ceramic-and-concrete aggregate plinth. The sacrifice is intended as a kind of “poetic justice,” placing Drake’s artistic achievement literally above Gates’s.
“The conceptual attempt was to not make pots that demonstrate my ceramic prowess but break my pots to celebrate this beautiful object that Dave made,” Gates said. He described the destruction of his own vessels as an offering to Drake and his family, and emphasized the importance of allowing the public to witness the transfer of stewardship back to descendants.
Gates began communicating with Drake’s family last year after receiving a call from Fatheree. Gates has said his interest was not institutional or symbolic, but rooted in what he framed as an “artistic and familial right” to return the work as a gift.
The exhibition also extends a relationship Gates has been building with Drake’s practice for nearly two decades. Gates first encountered Drake’s work in 2008 while studying ceramics under Ingrid Lilligre, who pointed him toward a 1998 exhibition on Drake at the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. That introduction, Gates has said, opened onto questions of survival and erasure — and onto a lineage of Black material culture shaped by makers whose names were often suppressed.
In 2010, Gates collaborated with curator Ethan Lasser on “To Speculate Darkly: Theaster Gates and Dave the Potter” at the Milwaukee Art Museum, a project that explored Drake’s life and vessels alongside multimedia works. At the time, Drake’s descendants had not yet been identified; a genealogist later traced the lineage, locating family members six years after the Milwaukee exhibition. When Lasser organized the traveling exhibition “Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2022–23, Drake’s descendants were brought into the project as consultants, further reshaping how the story is told.
The 1857 jar returned by the MFA Boston carries the exhibition’s title phrase, “I wonder where is all my relation.” The inscription has been understood as a poignant reference to Drake’s forced separation from a woman believed to have been his wife and her two sons — a reminder that, in Drake’s work, language and clay are inseparable from the violence of the system that constrained his life.
At Gagosian, Gates’s decision to build an exhibition around restitution — and to stage his own material sacrifice in service of Drake’s vessel — suggests a model of contemporary authorship that is less about possession than about repair. The show’s central drama is not the arrival of a masterpiece, but the deliberate act of returning it.
