Theaster Gates Gifts David Drake Vessel to Descendants

“It started out as young scholarly curiosity,” the artist Theaster Gates said of his initial interest in the work of the 19th-century enslaved potter David Drake, also known as Dave the Potter.

Gates was an undergraduate at Iowa State University in the early ’90s, making ceramics that he said referenced “white Americana craft” from the ’60s, like Peter Voulkos and Rudy Autio. While he admired that work, Gates recalled talking to his professor, Ingrid Lilligren, about the lineage in which he was working, asking, “Are the only named people we know all white guys?” He felt that “there was no precedent for the kind of craft I’m interested in making.”

But Lilligren pointed him to the school library which held a small catalog discussing Dave the Potter, whose work was just beginning to be recognized more widely. “Dave was a kind of archetype of a Black poet-potter, as a way of developing an apparatus for believing more in myself. I believed more in Dave first: look at him, then look at me,” he said, adding that it got him to asking of himself, “Is it possible for me to announce Dave as a way of justifying my own Black craftsmanship?”

And thus began Gates’s decades-long engagement with Drake’s work, which has included a 2010 exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum that included a book of hymns responding to the poems David had incised into several of his vessels. That culminated, in a way, with Gates acquiring a Drake work in 2021. “By 2021, Dave was explicitly on my mind,” he said, noting that he thought to himself, “I think I’m ready. I think I want to invest in this.” He saw it as “a way of honoring all of the ways that Dave had given meaning to my practice—let me go and get some Dave up in the studio.”

Now, Gates has decided to gift his Drake vessel to the artist’s descendants, who have made headlines recently for their pursuit of the “ethical restitution” of Drake’s art to the family, including securing an ownership transfer of two of Drake pots owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, last October. To mark the occasion, Gates has made the ownership transfer, the Drake vessel, and his own art about Drake the focus of an exhibition at Gagosian’s Park & 75 space in the Upper East Side (through May 2). He characterized the show as a way of “making an offering to Dave.”

Drake’s status within the mainstream art world has drastically changed over the past decade, recognized for its aesthetic and historical value, especially given that as an enslaved Black man it would have been illegal for Drake—who lived in Edgefield, South Carolina, and took his enslaver’s surname after emancipation—to be literate. That he was able to not only sign his name to his work, which legally belonged to his enslaver, but also write moving poems for them is a testament to Drake’s prowess as both artist and poet.

The most high-profile showing of Drake’s art came via “Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina,” which debuted in 2022 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before traveling to Boston, Atlanta, and Ann Arbor, Michigan.

The past decade has also seen Drake’s descendants, who learned of their ancestor only 10 years ago, seeking to reclaim the ownership of their ancestor’s art, which began in earnest after the opening of “Hear Me Now.”

“We want to bring all the pots that Dave put out home,” Yaba Baker, one of Drake’s descendants, told ARTnews in an interview. “We don’t want it to be a zero-sum game.” Instead, the family is looking at each individual case to plot out what works best for both sides in order to “make it more of an ethical ownership.” The family still wants museums to have Drake’s work on view, Baker said, “because his story is an amazing story that everybody can draw from.”

Though at least 60 institutions, and countless private collectors, own Drake’s 200-some surviving works, so far the MFA Boston, which co-organized the traveling exhibition, has been the only one to publicly announce such a restitution. In its wall label, the MFA Boston characterized the provenance and ownership of Drake’s art as “broken” given that it was “conceptualized and created under duress,” referring to his years of enslavement. 

Baker recalled first meeting Gates at the Michigan stop of “Hear Me Now” a few years back and being struck by “his commitment to Dave.” Then a few months back, George Fatheree, the attorney representing the family in its restitution pursuits, suggested contacting Gates about an ownership transfer of the work he owned.

Gates recalled receiving a letter last fall from Fatheree, who framed the situation within the context of restitution, but Gates said his reply was simple, along the lines of “if you’re asking for my pot, I just need to talk to the family.” Having long been invested in the amplification of Drake’s work, Gates said he didn’t think that a conversation around reparations and restitution concerning a Drake vessel was necessarily applicable to him. He eventually ended up speaking Baker who said, “We’re just trying to honor our ancestor,” Gates recalled, to which he replied, “I can help you do that.”

Gates made the decision to gift ownership back to Drake’s descendants almost immediately. Baker recalled Gates offering to load it up on a truck and sending it over right away. “I wasn’t expecting the magnitude of his generosity,” Baker said. “From that point on, it has been free-flowing and just a great relationship. We built our own friendship outside of that, and he’s like a family member to us.”

But Gates said he wanted to be clear about his reasoning for the gift, “I am not giving you this in some act of shame or some act of reconstituted justice. I’m excited for the family to have my pot because they should have this pot.” Reflecting on the decision, Gates added, “I think the pot has already given me what it needs to—and I didn’t own it in the first place.”

Hanging on one wall of the Park & 75 gallery is the three-page contract, or the “Asset Purchase Agreement,” between Gates and the Dave the Potter Legacy Trust LLC, which the family established to handle these claims. The document sets the sale price at $1 to “be paid in cash” by the trust and describes the transaction as an “as-is sale.” Gates acknowledged that the legacy of contracts when talking about an enslaved person can be tricky, difficult terrain, but he sees this is yet another intervention. “There should be other contracts in this legacy that are optimistic in their futures,” he said.

For the moment, Gates will hold onto Drake’s pot as a matter of “safe-keeping” as he put. But as its new owners, the family now has final sale on whether or not to sell the vessel in the future, with any profits derived from it benefiting them. “Even though I think I’m giving a gift, it still feels like justice in some kind of beautiful way,” he said.

As the terms were being negotiated, Gates was making plans for his next solo show with Gagosian. When he learned that he would have the Park & 75 space, he knew the jewel-box gallery would require an exhibition of work on a more intimate scale than he had been showing recently. At first, he thought he might just show the contract between him and the family, but ultimately felt that it needed to be an “offering to Dave,” he said, adding “What can I do so that it’s a little more than some transactional mechanism that is captured in time?”

Gates began looking around his studio and realized that there were several pots he had made that he had no plans to sell. “Those pots had also given me what I needed from,” he said, adding that they had been experiments in his working with clay and together were “part of the visual well of the studio [that] represented time and labor.”

He decided to put about 45 of them in a ball mill and pulverize them and mix them with shards from his other vessels and a binder to make a new work, Plinth for Dave (2026), a gray horizontal cuboid on which, in the exhibition, Drake’s vessel now rests. Gates sees the contrast between the minimalist design of Plinth and Drake’s 1855 vessel as “modernism holding craft.”

In addition to Plinth and the contract, Gates has also included a selection of three works related to Drake that he made in 2010 while in residency at the Kohler Arts Center, as well as a new vessel made this year in response to Drake’s, which has a similar color and shape but measures 3 feet tall. Gates incised an inscription on it, fusing Drake’s words, “Where is all my relations?” with his own response, “Shit Dave, where are all our patrons.” Gates sees it as a way to tackle “this desire for the family to be made whole.”