LEILA FADEL, HOST:
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has returned two monumental stoneware vessels to descendants of the enslaved man who made them. It's the latest example of museums researching the origins of items in their collections and restoring ownership of those acquired unethically, like Indigenous works or treasures stolen by Nazis. Here's WBUR's Andrea Shea.
ANDREA SHEA, BYLINE: The two jars are big and heavy. One of them weighs 35 pounds. Their ruddy-brown clay glazed with wide mouths. Utilitarian, but beautiful. They were made by an enslaved potter who simply signed them Dave. Research revealed his name was David Drake.
VICTORIA REED: This is really a story about the family. It's a story about the vessels. It's a story about David Drake's legacy.
SHEA: Victoria Reed is the Museum of Fine Arts chair for provenance. Over the past 22 years, she's traced origins and orchestrated returns of wrongfully acquired antiquities and art. Reed says this landmark restitution began in 2023 when Drake's pieces were part of a groundbreaking traveling exhibition about the Black potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina. Other museums possess Drake's pots, but the MFA's curators started conversations with his descendants.
REED: Prompting questions of rightful ownership and the artist's legacy.
SHEA: This week, about 15 of Drake's descendants traveled to Boston for a restoration ceremony.
REED: There's a lot of emotion in this room. I've never seen anything like this. It's like a family reunion with this vessel in the center of it, right? Like, they're really being reunited with Dave.
SHEA: They gather around one of Dave's pots for family photos.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: We are Dave.
UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: We are Dave.
(LAUGHTER)
PAULINE BAKER: We are just ecstatic and delighted and moved by the actions of MFA, really, because we know this is the first time this has ever happened. So this is a hallelujah moment.
SHEA: Pauline Baker is the artist's great-great-great-granddaughter.
BAKER: It shows courage and integrity that you're willing to abide by your policies that you have established for others and that it can apply to African Americans, as well.
SHEA: After the official legal transfer, the museum repurchased one of the jars from the descendants. The family retains ownership of the second pot but is loaning it back to keep sharing his story. Baker says David Drake worked seven days a week at the Stony Bluff Manufactory. The vessels he made stored food and were sold to plantations. Drake began dating and signing his work Dave in the 1830s.
BAKER: It's really something for an African American family to be able to identify someone in the 19th century.
SHEA: He also etched poems into his pots. On one jar, he asked, where is all my relations?
BAKER: And so we're here. The world heard you, Dave.
SHEA: But writing those words and signing his name were potentially deadly acts of defiance because it was illegal for enslaved people to be literate. Drake lived from about 1801 until he died a free man a few years after the Civil War. Baker says this ceremony brings his story full circle.
BAKER: I think he wanted to try to say, I was alive. I lived. You cannot erase my history. You can't enslave my mind. You can't enslave my spirit or my soul.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: We are Dave.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: We are Dave.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: We are Dave.
SHEA: For NPR News, I'm Andrea Shea in Boston.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHRISTIAN SCOTT ATUNDE ADJUAH'S "PERSPECTIVES") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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