Theaster Gates's Restituted Dave the Potter Jar Goes on View at Hampton

By Tom Whitfield

A stoneware jar by David Drake, the enslaved ceramist known as "Dave the Potter," goes on view at the Hampton University Museum in Virginia on Wednesday, October 21 — the first work returned to Drake's descendants under a restitution campaign to be displayed at a historically Black university. The loan runs through May 2027.

Theaster Gates transferred ownership of the vessel to Drake's descendants in May, setting a precedent for what the family calls "ethical restitution." The family estimates that roughly 200 of Drake's surviving works remain in the hands of museums and collectors. Its pitch to institutions is simple: return the jars to the family, and the family will keep them on view and accessible to the public.

Hampton is now the test case.

"It is indeed an honor to showcase this historic pottery," museum director Dr. Vanessa Thaxton-Ward said in a statement, expressing "great thanks to the Drake family descendants."

Who was David Drake?

Drake was born into enslavement in Edgefield District, South Carolina, under laws that forbade Black literacy. He made some 40,000 jars in bondage, inscribing many with his name and, defying those laws, with poems of his own devising. ARTnews named his 1857 Storage Jar the greatest artwork about the United States of America. One side of that pot reads: "When you fill this Jar with pork or beef / Scot will be there; to get a peace, — / Dave."

The market caught up with the biography. In 2021, Drake's 25-gallon stoneware jar sold for $1.56 million at Crocker Farm — the world auction record for American pottery. In 2022, the Metropolitan Museum of Art debuted "Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina," which later traveled to Boston, Atlanta, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. After that show, the descendants began their reclamation campaign in earnest.

What does the restitution campaign change?

Since 2025, the family has reportedly reached agreements with five museums and two collectors, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens; the Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia; and the Milwaukee Art Museum. Each institution contacted is offered a choice: repurchase or deaccession its jar.

The arrangement keeps the works public while transferring legal ownership — a middle path between outright retention and physical return. The family's count of 200 works in institutional and private hands, however, is its own estimate, and the reported number of agreements is not independently itemized in the announcement.

At Hampton, the jar joins a collection that includes works by Henry O. Tanner, one of the first African American painters to earn international renown, and Thomas Day, a master cabinetmaker and free man of color from North Carolina.

Yaba Baker, Drake's fourth-great-grandson, thanked Gates for his part in the return. "When I look at Dave's pottery, I think about the conditions he was living in and the courage it took for him to write his name and poetry into the clay," Baker said in a statement. "Our ancestor left something for his family to find — a voice, a connection, a way to know him."

Baker added: "Loaning this jar to Hampton University Museum is a full-circle moment for me. I attended Hampton, and it literally changed my life! Playing a role in my alma mater being the first HBCU to show a Drake jar fills me with joy and pride."

The Hampton display runs through May 2027, giving the restitution model a public runway of more than eighteen months to prove that ownership can change hands without a work ever leaving a gallery wall.