Among the three centuries of work in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s semiquincentennial exhibition “A Nation of Artists” is an eighty-three-pound alkaline-glazed stoneware jar made by the enslaved potter David Drake, also known as Dave the Potter, in 1859.
The museum has described the monumental pot as a “highlight” of the exhibition and has positioned it alongside upholstered chairs, oil paintings, and decorative wallpaper in a section titled “Prosper, Abundance, and Inequity,” designed to resemble an antebellum living room. Its placement there is both an acknowledgment of the way the work of enslaved people enriched slave-holding families and their heirs and a recognition of the work as existing among great American art.
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Drake’s descendants, however, have asked the museum to return the pot to the Dave the Potter Legacy Trust, formed to reinstate Drake’s work to his family. “We want to own the pieces free and clear,” Yaba Baker, Dave’s fourth great-grandson and executive director of the Dave the Potter Legacy Trust, told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Our goal is to then loan them back into public spaces so they can be viewed and Dave’s story can be told to the next generation.”
The trust is working with Los Angeles-based real estate attorney and social justice advocate George Fatheree III, who has helped negotiate the return of several of Drake’s pots. Last month, the Milwaukee Art Museum announced that it was transferring ownership of two stoneware jars by Drake to his descendants in an agreement with the Dave the Potter Legacy Trust.
According to the Inquirer, Fatheree has been in contact with the Philadelphia Museum of Art but has to date had only “a few conversations that I would characterize as cordial in tone, but noncommittal.”