Milwaukee Art Museum Returns David Drake Pots to Enslaved Artist's Family

Two stoneware pots by David Drake, the enslaved artist known as Dave the Potter, were returned to his descendants earlier this month in a repatriation deal brokered by the Milwaukee Art Museum with the Dave the Potter Legacy Trust. The museum immediately bought one of the vessels back. The second will return to public view through a long-term loan.

Both pots will therefore remain in Milwaukee — a condition the family explicitly wanted.

The works first reached the museum in 2010, when the Chipstone Foundation mounted an exhibition pairing Drake's vessels with work by the Chicago-based sculptor Theaster Gates. "People were fascinated by Drake's objects, which led the foundation to develop programming that unearthed the meaning of Drake's work and his legacy for communities across the city," The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

Three years later, in 2013, the Chipstone Foundation — a Wisconsin-based organization dedicated to American material culture, with an emphasis on the decorative arts — bought two pots by Drake. The museum has displayed them since as part of the Dave Project, its ongoing collaboration with the foundation.

Drake, who lived and worked in slavery in South Carolina, is renowned for the large stoneware vessels he signed and, in defiance of the era's anti-literacy laws for enslaved people, inscribed with couplets. His surviving pots are held in major American museums and command attention as both ceramic achievements and documents of resistance.

Yaba Baker, Drake's fourth-generation great-grandson, framed the family's decision to keep both works on view in Milwaukee as a matter of legacy. "We believe it is important that people continue to be inspired by his unwavering perseverance in life and the brilliance that it took to create these amazing pieces of art," Baker told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "By keeping both works on view in Milwaukee, we know that his legacy and lineage will remain accessible to the public for years to come."

Kantara Souffrant, the Milwaukee Art Museum's curator of community dialogue, described the significance of the Dave the Potter Legacy Trust's approach to the restitution. "[Their work] is so invested in the idea of what it means to be a person who's descended from enslaved people, who is able to see these objects as a way of really, truly gathering your family, family you didn't know," Souffrant said.

The arrangement — repatriation followed by a repurchase and a long-term loan — offers a model for other institutions weighing claims on works by Drake and other enslaved artists in their collections. For now, museum visitors in Milwaukee will continue to see the vessels, under new terms that place ownership with Drake's descendants.