Theaster Gates Turns a Decades-Long Dialogue With Dave the Potter Into an Act of Return
For more than 30 years, American artist Theaster Gates (b. 1973) has treated the work of David Drake, the enslaved 19th-century potter known as Dave the Potter, as both artistic precedent and moral compass. Now that relationship has taken a new form: Gates is giving a Drake vessel he owned to Drake’s descendants, folding a personal gesture into a broader debate over restitution, ownership, and the place of Black craft in museum history.
Gates first encountered Drake while studying ceramics at Iowa State University in the early 1990s. At the time, he was making work that referenced what he called “white Americana craft” from the 1960s, including the work of Peter Voulkos and Rudy Autio. He later recalled asking his professor, Ingrid Lilligren, whether the field’s recognized lineage was defined almost entirely by white men. A small catalog in the university library introduced him to Drake, whose signed and inscribed vessels offered a different model of authorship, labor, and Black artistic self-definition.
That discovery became foundational. Gates has said he saw Drake as “a kind of archetype of a Black poet-potter,” and that looking at Drake helped him imagine his own practice more clearly. In 2010, he mounted an exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum that included a book of hymns responding to Drake’s poems incised into vessels. By 2021, Gates said, he felt ready to acquire a Drake work himself — an act he described as a way of honoring the influence Drake had exerted on his studio practice.
The new exhibition at Gagosian’s Park & 75 space on the Upper East Side, on view through May 2, centers that ownership transfer alongside Gates’s own art about Drake. Gates has described the presentation as “making an offering to Dave.” The show arrives as Drake’s reputation has expanded sharply over the past decade, especially after the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2022 exhibition “Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina,” which later traveled to Boston, Atlanta, and Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Drake’s historical significance is inseparable from the conditions under which he worked. An enslaved Black man in Edgefield, South Carolina, he could not legally have been literate, yet he signed his name to vessels that belonged to his enslaver and wrote poems on them as well. That combination of technical command and literary voice has made his work central to conversations about authorship, race, and the afterlives of enslavement in American art.
His descendants, who learned of their ancestor only about 10 years ago, have since pursued what they call ethical restitution. Yaba Baker, one of Drake’s descendants, said the family wants the pots Drake made to “come home,” but not in a zero-sum way. Instead, they are weighing each case individually, seeking what Baker called “more of an ethical ownership” while still allowing museums to keep Drake’s work on view. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston publicly announced an ownership transfer of two Drake pots last October, underscoring how the conversation around his legacy is now moving from recognition to repair.
