{"id":1893161,"date":"2026-04-20T21:05:39","date_gmt":"2026-04-20T18:05:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1893161"},"modified":"2026-04-20T21:05:39","modified_gmt":"2026-04-20T18:05:39","slug":"theaster-gates-gifts-david-drake-vessel-to-descendants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1893161","title":{"rendered":"Theaster Gates Gifts David Drake Vessel to Descendants"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/GATES_PORTRAIT_2026.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\t\u201cIt started out as young scholarly curiosity,\u201d the artist Theaster Gates said of his initial interest in the work of the 19th-century enslaved potter David Drake, also known as Dave the Potter.<\/p>\n

\n\tGates was an undergraduate at Iowa State University in the early \u201990s, making ceramics that he said referenced \u201cwhite Americana craft\u201d from the \u201960s, like Peter Voulkos and Rudy Autio. While he admired that work, Gates recalled talking to his professor, Ingrid Lilligren, about the lineage in which he was working, asking, \u201cAre the only named people we know all white guys?\u201d He felt that \u201cthere was no precedent for the kind of craft I\u2019m interested in making.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Lilligren pointed him to the school library which held a small catalog discussing Dave the Potter, whose work was just beginning to be recognized more widely. \u201cDave was a kind of archetype of a Black poet-potter, as a way of developing an apparatus for believing more in myself. I believed more in Dave first: look at him, then look at me,\u201d he said, adding that it got him to asking of himself, \u201cIs it possible for me to announce Dave as a way of justifying my own Black craftsmanship?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd thus began Gates\u2019s decades-long engagement with Drake\u2019s work, which has included a 2010 exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum that included a book of hymns responding to the poems David had incised into several of his vessels. That culminated, in a way, with Gates acquiring a Drake work in 2021. \u201cBy 2021, Dave was explicitly on my mind,\u201d he said, noting that he thought to himself, \u201cI think I\u2019m ready. I think I want to invest in this.\u201d He saw it as \u201ca way of honoring all of the ways that Dave had given meaning to my practice\u2014let me go and get some Dave up in the studio.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNow, Gates has decided to gift his Drake vessel to the artist\u2019s descendants, who have made headlines recently for their pursuit of the \u201cethical restitution\u201d of Drake\u2019s art to the family, including securing an ownership transfer of two of Drake pots owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, last October. To mark the occasion, Gates has made the ownership transfer, the Drake vessel, and his own art about Drake the focus of an exhibition at Gagosian\u2019s Park & 75 space in the Upper East Side (through May 2). He characterized the show as a way of \u201cmaking an offering to Dave.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"View<\/div>\n<\/div>
Installation view of Theaster Gates\u2019s 2026 solo show, \u201cDave: All My Relations,\u201d at Gagosian Park & 75, New York.<\/span>Photo Maris Hutchinson\/\u00a9Theaster Gates\/Courtesy Gagosian and the Dave Potter Legacy Trust LLC<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Drake\u2019s status within the mainstream art<\/strong> world has drastically changed over the past decade, recognized for its aesthetic and historical value, especially given that as an enslaved Black man it would have been illegal for Drake\u2014who lived in Edgefield, South Carolina, and took his enslaver\u2019s surname after emancipation\u2014to be literate. That he was able to not only sign his name to his work, which legally belonged to his enslaver, but also write moving poems for them is a testament to Drake\u2019s prowess as both artist and poet.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe most high-profile showing of Drake\u2019s art came via \u201cHear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina,\u201d which debuted in 2022 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before traveling to Boston, Atlanta, and Ann Arbor, Michigan.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe past decade has also seen Drake\u2019s descendants, who learned of their ancestor only 10 years ago, seeking to reclaim the ownership of their ancestor\u2019s art, which began in earnest after the opening of \u201cHear Me Now.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe want to bring all the pots that Dave put out home,\u201d Yaba Baker, one of Drake\u2019s descendants, told ARTnews<\/em> in an interview. \u201cWe don\u2019t want it to be a zero-sum game.\u201d Instead, the family is looking at each individual case to plot out what works best for both sides in order to \u201cmake it more of an ethical ownership.\u201d The family still wants museums to have Drake\u2019s work on view, Baker said, \u201cbecause his story is an amazing story that everybody can draw from.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"View<\/div>\n<\/div>
Installation view of Theaster Gates\u2019s 2026 solo show, \u201cDave: All My Relations,\u201d at Gagosian Park & 75, New York.<\/span>Photo Maris Hutchinson\/\u00a9Theaster Gates\/Courtesy Gagosian and the Dave Potter Legacy Trust LLC<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tThough at least 60 institutions, and countless private collectors, own Drake\u2019s 200-some surviving works, so far the MFA Boston, which co-organized the traveling exhibition, has been the only one to publicly announce such a restitution. In its wall label, the MFA Boston characterized the provenance and ownership of Drake\u2019s art as \u201cbroken\u201d given that it was \u201cconceptualized and created under duress,\u201d referring to his years of enslavement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBaker recalled first meeting Gates at the Michigan stop of \u201cHear Me Now\u201d a few years back and being struck by \u201chis commitment to Dave.\u201d Then a few months back, George Fatheree, the attorney representing the family in its restitution pursuits, suggested contacting Gates about an ownership transfer of the work he owned.<\/p>\n

\n\tGates recalled receiving a letter last fall from Fatheree, who framed the situation within the context of restitution, but Gates said his reply was simple, along the lines of \u201cif you\u2019re asking for my pot, I just need to talk to the family.\u201d Having long been invested in the amplification of Drake\u2019s work, Gates said he didn\u2019t think that a conversation around reparations and restitution concerning a Drake vessel was necessarily applicable to him. He eventually ended up speaking Baker who said, \u201cWe\u2019re just trying to honor our ancestor,\u201d Gates recalled, to which he replied, \u201cI can help you do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tGates made the decision to gift ownership back to Drake\u2019s descendants almost immediately. Baker recalled Gates offering to load it up on a truck and sending it over right away. \u201cI wasn\u2019t expecting the magnitude of his generosity,\u201d Baker said. \u201cFrom that point on, it has been free-flowing and just a great relationship. We built our own friendship outside of that, and he\u2019s like a family member to us.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Gates said he wanted to be clear about his reasoning for the gift, \u201cI am not giving you this in some act of shame or some act of reconstituted justice. I\u2019m excited for the family to have my pot because they should<\/em> have this pot.\u201d Reflecting on the decision, Gates added, \u201cI think the pot has already given me what it needs to\u2014and I didn\u2019t own it in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"Three<\/div>\n<\/div>
Installation view of Theaster Gates\u2019s 2026 solo show, \u201cDave: All My Relations,\u201d at Gagosian Park & 75, New York.<\/span>Photo Maris Hutchinson\/\u00a9Theaster Gates\/Courtesy Gagosian<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tHanging on one wall of the Park & 75 gallery is the three-page contract, or the \u201cAsset Purchase Agreement,\u201d between Gates and the Dave the Potter Legacy Trust LLC, which the family established to handle these claims. The document sets the sale price at $1 to \u201cbe paid in cash\u201d by the trust and describes the transaction as an \u201cas-is sale.\u201d Gates acknowledged that the legacy of contracts when talking about an enslaved person can be tricky, difficult terrain, but he sees this is yet another intervention. \u201cThere should be other contracts in this legacy that are optimistic in their futures,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor the moment, Gates will hold onto Drake\u2019s pot as a matter of \u201csafe-keeping\u201d as he put. But as its new owners, the family now has final sale on whether or not to sell the vessel in the future, with any profits derived from it benefiting them. \u201cEven though I think I\u2019m giving a gift, it still feels like justice in some kind of beautiful way,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs the terms were being negotiated, Gates was making plans for his next solo show with Gagosian. When he learned that he would have the Park & 75 space, he knew the jewel-box gallery would require an exhibition of work on a more intimate scale than he had been showing recently. At first, he thought he might just show the contract between him and the family, but ultimately felt that it needed to be an \u201coffering to Dave,\u201d he said, adding \u201cWhat can I do so that it\u2019s a little more than some transactional mechanism that is captured in time?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tGates began looking around his studio and realized that there were several pots he had made that he had no plans to sell. \u201cThose pots had also given me what I needed from,\u201d he said, adding that they had been experiments in his working with clay and together were \u201cpart of the visual well of the studio [that] represented time and labor.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"A<\/div>\n<\/div>
Theaster Gates, Untitled<\/em>, 2026, installation view. <\/span>Photo Maris Hutchinson\/\u00a9Theaster Gates\/Courtesy Gagosian<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tHe decided to put about 45 of them in a ball mill and pulverize them and mix them with shards from his other vessels and a binder to make a new work, Plinth for Dave <\/em>(2026), a gray horizontal cuboid on which, in the exhibition, Drake\u2019s vessel now rests. Gates sees the contrast between the minimalist design of Plinth<\/em> and Drake\u2019s 1855 vessel as \u201cmodernism holding craft.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn addition to Plinth<\/em> and the contract, Gates has also included a selection of three works related to Drake that he made in 2010 while in residency at the Kohler Arts Center, as well as a new vessel made this year in response to Drake\u2019s, which has a similar color and shape but measures 3 feet tall. Gates incised an inscription on it, fusing Drake\u2019s words, \u201cWhere is all my relations?\u201d with his own response, \u201cShit Dave, where are all our patrons.\u201d Gates sees it as a way to tackle \u201cthis desire for the family to be made whole.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/GATES_PORTRAIT_2026.jpg?w=1024″] \u201cIt started out as young scholarly curiosity,\u201d the artist Theaster Gates said of his initial interest in the work of the 19th-century enslaved potter David Drake, also known as Dave the Potter. Gates was an undergraduate at Iowa State University in the early \u201990s, making ceramics that he said referenced \u201cwhite Americana […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1893161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1893161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1893161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1893161\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1893161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1893161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1893161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}