Metropolitan Museum of Art  | Hear Me Now exhibition catalog

Focusing on the work of African American potters in the 19th-century American South—in dialogue with contemporary artistic responses—this exhibition catalog presents approximately 50 ceramic objects from Old Edgefield District, South Carolina, a center of stoneware production in the decades before the Civil War. Hear Me Now includes monumental storage jars by enslaved and literate potter and poet David Drake alongside rare examples of the region’s utilitarian wares, as well as enigmatic face vessels whose makers were unrecorded. Considered through the lens of current scholarship in the fields of history, literature, anthropology, material culture, diaspora, and African American studies, these 19th-century vessels testify to the lived experiences, artistic agency, and material knowledge of enslaved peoples.

The clear PVC jacket design allows the title typography to appear with the incised verse on this monumental storage jar by David Drake.