12/27/2025
The conversations around Dave’s pottery are important and complex.
Who Owns An Enslaved Voice -
Dave the Potter’s signed jars force museums to confront authorship, inheritance, and restitution.
In a gallery in Boston, an elder slid her hand inside a wide-mouthed jar and searched the dark interior by touch. The jar was monumental—stoneware with a thick shoulder and a rim that had outlasted the centuries the way river stones outlast weather. Her fingertips moved along clay that had once been wet and living under another set of hands. She paused when she felt a slight rise, a small ridge in the fired earth, and she imagined it as evidence: sweat falling, a forearm brushing the lip, a thumb pressing a seam into obedience. In that instant the jar was no longer an artifact. It was contact.
The woman was Daisy Whitner, and the jar had been made by her ancestor David Drake—known to the art world, the auction world, and to generations of Black Southerners who have carried his story like a quiet inheritance—as Dave the Potter. In November 2025, Whitner and other descendants stood inside the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as the institution restored ownership of two of Dave’s jars to his family through a landmark restitution agreement. One jar was sold back to the museum so it could remain on public view; the other stayed at the MFA on long-term loan, with ownership resting where it had always morally belonged.
That gesture—return, then purchase, then loan—sounds, on paper, like tidy legal choreography. But anyone who has ever held a family story that was stolen, renamed, and dispersed understands it differently. For descendants, the return was described as “spiritual restoration,” a closing of a circle that slavery had shattered and the marketplace had monetized. For the museum, it was framed as provenance work and an “ownership resolution,” borrowing language and structure long associated with restitution cases involving Nazi-looted art.
For Dave—who could not legally own his own body, much less the objects his hands produced—the return reads like a belated answer to a question he cut into clay in 1857: “I wonder where is all my relation / friendship to all—and every nation.”
Read the full article at https://www.kolumnmagazine.com/2025/12/23/who-owns-an-enslaved-voice/
