Boston museum returns enslaved potter's work to his descendants

In 1850s South Carolina, David Drake made thousands of clay pots—large vessels for storing food, stamped with his signature and inscriptions. He never owned a single one. His enslaver did.

Nearly 200 years later, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has changed that. The museum transferred ownership of two of Drake's pots to his descendants, then repurchased one of them (Poem Jar) from the family. The other, Signed Jar, came to the museum on a long-term loan.

"Our great-great-great-grandfather never got to own one single piece of his own pottery or to pass them on to his children and grandchildren," says Pauline Baker, Drake's descendant. "Today the museum does all it can to right that wrong."

The defiance in the clay

What makes Drake's pots remarkable isn't just their craftsmanship. It's what he wrote on them. In a time when teaching enslaved people to read or write was illegal—roughly 90 percent of enslaved people in the South remained illiterate—Drake signed his work. He inscribed reflections on his own life.

On one jar: "I wonder where is all my relation / Friendship to all—and every nation." Drake's family had been separated by enslavement.

Poem Jar carries a different kind of defiance: "I made this Jar = for cash / Though it's called Lucre trash." Drake was naming the system itself. His enslaver profited from his labor. He knew it. He wrote it down.

"That's a Rosa Parks moment," says Yaba Baker, Drake's great-great-great-great-grandson, speaking to the Boston Globe. "David Drake should be honored and thought of in that way—not just as an artist, but an artist who had a purpose to defy oppressive laws."

A precedent that changes everything

This return matters beyond one family's justice. According to George Fatheree, the lawyer representing Drake's descendants, artworks by enslaved Black Americans have been almost entirely absent from repatriation conversations in the United States. Museums have returned looted artifacts from colonized regions, stolen sculptures from ancient civilizations—but the work of enslaved artists in America has remained invisible in these discussions.

"There's literally no precedent for this," Fatheree told the Boston Globe. "Works by enslaved African American artists have been absent from the art world's conversation about restitution, but the museum's action really changes that forever."

The Museum of Fine Arts reached this moment partly through its own reckoning. In 2022, it collaborated with New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art on an exhibition called "Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina"—a show that centered Drake and the clay-rich region where he worked. That conversation led here.

Drake's descendants have established the Dave the Potter Legacy Trust to manage the transfer and distribute proceeds from future sales of his work. They're also inviting anyone who believes they may be related to Drake to reach out, expanding the circle of people who can claim a stake in his legacy.

What happens next will likely ripple through museums and collections across the country. Once you've named the absence, it becomes harder to ignore.