In works like Seed Carrier, North Carolina potter Jim McDowell explores the Black American experience, telling stories of both oppression and joy through the form of the face vessel. This type of vessel is associated with mid-nineteenth-century African American craftsmen (both enslaved and free) in the Edgefield district of South Carolina. Many scholars believe that these early examples reflect the continuation of African religious and spiritual practices, and oral histories tie them to African American burial traditions. Over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the face vessel form was adopted by white folk potters, some of whom earned widespread acclaim for their work. McDowell seeks to reclaim the form as an expression of Black culture. As a child, he learned of a great-great-great-great-aunt who made face vessels as an enslaved potter in Jamaica, and for the artist, the grotesque faces reflect the painful history of slavery and its aftermath. His style is improvisational, and he embraces drips and other imperfections. Inspired by the celebrated David Drake, a nineteenth-century enslaved Black potter known for his defiant practice of inscribing poems on his vessels at a time when it was illegal for slaves to read and write, McDowell incorporates text into his works to tell stories of Black life and achievements.
Seed Carrier commemorates the role of enslaved African women in the introduction of rice cultivation to the Americas. While conventional narratives credit white explorers with importing rice seeds from Asia, oral histories describe how African women carried the seeds across the Middle Passage by braiding them in their hair, as a way to bolster their chance of survival in bondage. As rice farmers in their homeland, their expertise played a crucial part in establishing the crop in the Americas. Recent scholarship by Dr. Judith A. Carney and others has provided concrete evidence to support these claims, tracing varieties of rice in the Americas back to African sources. McDowell learned of this history while visiting the South Carolina Rice Museum, and from Leah Pennington’s book Farming While Black. His inscription, “I Bring Seeds,” centers the agency and ingenuity of these African women. McDowell also marked the vessel with “BLM,” the acronym for Black Lives Matter, as he has done in many works. As he explains: “I write BLM on my jugs because for so long we’ve been told we’re not worthy and not capable, but the world needs to know the contribution Black people have made to this country and are still making to this country. We need to be included.”
Staci Steinberger
2021