- Artist or Maker
- Theaster Gates
United States, Illinois, Chicago, born 1973 - Title
- Vessel #12
- Date Made
- 2020
- Medium
- Stoneware, reclaimed ash
- Dimensions
- 41 × 21 × 20 in. (104.14 × 53.34 × 50.8 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.2023.199
- Collecting Area
- Decorative Arts and Design
- Curatorial Notes
Theaster Gates’s Vessel #12 comprises a hand-coiled, manganese-glazed stoneware vessel on a pedestal of reclaimed ash. The piece references the quintessential vessel forms and dripping surfaces of Tokoname ware as well as the utilitarian vessels of the enslaved Black potter David Drake of Edgefield, South Carolina. One of the few Black potters in the antebellum South to be identified by name, Drake wrote short couplets on his large storage pots, demonstrating his literacy and poetic gifts at a time when enslaved people were legally forbidden to read and write. Gates channels Drake’s defiance by inscribing the text of the deed that transfers ownership of one of his Chicago buildings to his nonprofit, the Rebuild Foundation. The text is obscured by glaze but preserved in perpetuity through the firing process, asserting a permanent Black autonomy in physical space, a piece of real property that cannot be stolen.
Gates’s ceramic studies began at Iowa State University; he spent a year apprenticing with Japanese potter Koichi Ohara in Tokoname, and worked as a studio potter early in his career. Over the years, his practice has expanded to include art making, performance, archival preservation, and urban regeneration, but clay and vessel making remain foundational to his work: “I always find myself returning to the vessel. It is part of the intellectual life force of my practice and it precedes all other forms of making.” In London in 2021, he organized the ambitious, multivenue exhibition The Question of Clay. Like this project, Vessel #12 richly references the artist’s personal history and Black cultural history more broadly.
Bobbye Tigerman
2023
- Copyright
- © Theaster Gates
