Oakland-based artist Woody De Othello uses anthropomorphic and even cartoonish forms to create thoughtful meditations on the experience of American Black life and diasporic culture. In Blank Faced, he explores the face jug tradition associated with mid-nineteenth-century African American craftsmen (both enslaved and free) in the Edgefield district of South Carolina. Many scholars believe that the vessels reflect the continuation of African religious and spiritual practices. For Othello, who is of Haitian descent, the jugs represent the complexity of the African diaspora and his own relationship to African American history. While his humorous exaggerated forms and Bay Area training have invited comparison to Robert Arneson, Viola Frey, and other artists in the region’s Funk ceramics tradition, Othello also positions his work in the lineage of Black American pottery. In addition to the face vessels, he has referenced work by nineteenth-century Edgefield craftsman David Drake, celebrated for his large-scale pots and witty inscriptions.
Othello first addressed the face vessel tradition in Faceless Face Jug (2016) when he was an MFA student at the California College of the Arts. In 2020, he spent the first several months of the COVID-19 lockdown at the prestigious ceramics residency hosted by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin. Returning to California, he found himself again drawn to the form. The featureless visage of Blank Faced, the first ceramic work created upon his return, embodies the artist’s experience of interiority during this period of isolation and disconnect. His use of a highly reflective glaze magnifies the sense of invisibility. Regarding the merger of human and object in his work, Othello noted that he is “captivated by this idea of the vessel being an analogy of the human body and a carrier of emotions.”
Staci Steinberger
2021
