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Amazing Grace
John Haberin New York City
Stone Bluff Manufactory and Black Potters
Betty Woodman and Jennifer Paige Cohen
More than a year before the American Civil War, Dave could see it coming. "Nineteen days," he wrote, "before Christmas – Eve – / lots of people after its over, how they will greave." But not everyone will be grieving.
The poet was only a first name because he was only a slave. Soon, though, he could sign his stoneware David Drake, and the black potters of Old Edgefield, in South Carolina, would go down in history as the Stone Bluff Manufactory. With "Hear Me Now," the Met wants their voice to be heard and their craft to be seen. It includes the voices of five contemporary African Americans as well. Could such prophecy and craft have left its mark on the medium and its emergence seemingly everywhere today? Betty Woodman makes clear her own influence and exuberance as pottery spills out across a gallery, while Jennifer Paige Cohen in plaster looks to everyday trials and a Grecian urn. 
How they will greave
Drake's stoneware stands outside a room for more, and it dominates a show of some fifty works by its number, sheer weight, and beauty. It makes a stunning rejoinder to the studied elegance of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux just outside the Lehman wing, itself a protest against slavery—or, for that matter, to racism in America. As a slave, Drake knew compulsion. He made a jar, he wrote, "for cash – / though its called = lucre trash." Still, he was proud of its function, to preserve and to store gallons at a time.
Good for lard – or holding – fresh meats =
blest we are – when peter saw the folded sheets
He could bless or refuse his masters as well. Some jars may have been too heavy to use, and he tempers their rich brown with yellow pours or spatters as defiant self-expression. Every so often they hint at a face. He also inscribed his poetry, along with his signature, as a show of strength, when literacy could incur serious punishment. Even the odd spelling feels his rather than a flaw, and the punctuation has an air of mathematical precision. He became a teacher and mentor to others.
The discovery of kaolin, a fine clay, near Old Edgefield, on the border with Georgia, enabled the production of ceramics, and the demand only grew. Some workers have come down as names, but others have not, and few can match Drake's skill or imagination. Still, they had a decorative freedom, too, and outright displays of blackness. Some jars incorporate flowers, loops, and feathers, as a symbol of flowering. The underside of one bears the imprint of a hand. A black male comes a courting hat in hand, and a black woman wears quite a dress.
Stoneware also developed a whole genre of expression and defiance, much as for Pueblo pottery elsewhere. Smaller "face jugs" turn their spouts into ears and their roundness into heads. Their exaggerated eyes and teeth play on African American stereotypes in full self-awareness. Their raw humor is intentional. They allow for sly grins and signs of life, best seen in a cluster of faces, and they persist into the 1880s. They have inspired contemporary art as well, with the revival of the decorative arts and folk art.
As curators, the Met's Adrienne Spinozzi, Ethan Lasser of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and Jason Young of the University of Michigan include five artists from just the last few years. Theaster Gates turns Drake's polished brown into a slab, with a signature but also an ugly gash. Simone Leigh recall's Drake's ambition with an even larger jar, in white. Its seven mouths have teeth like a face jug's, but modeled on cowrie shells, once traded as currency. A slim female head has its own blackness and refinement. Woody De Othello plays on face jugs, too, but in green, raising a hand to its head in bemusement or despair.
His ceramic is merely Applying Pressure, but Adebunmi Gbadebo returns to the site of the manufactory—and the burial site of her ancestors. Her ceramics add human hair and rice, nested like medicine in a pill box. Robert Pruitt asks instead about the preservation and legacy of stoneware today. His meticulous drawing, close to life size, shows an intern at the MFA holding a face jug. In a companion drawing it has morphed into a can of gasoline. Her clothing is way too informal for a museum, apart from a shawl based on traditional quilting, but none of the five are grieving.
Pouring out from pottery
Betty Woodman would be nothing short of imposing were she not just plain fun. There she was in the 1990s, in her sixties, when you might expect certainty rather than exuberance. There she was, too, in a time of conceptual art, much of it anything but fun. She did not have to make a political point—of ceramics as more than just "women's work," on a par with painting. She did not have to apologize for defying craft, with wild colors and even wilder shapes. Yet she made them a woman's signature, and she had craft to spare, not to mention joy.
You may have seen more than enough ceramics these days—like tapestry as painting, questioning the very distinction between art and craft. You may have seen them packing a shelf with variations on a style or theme. A lot, you may want to say, has changed in all these years, but Woodman was already a step ahead. She fills a room that any artist would envy, its gallery lighting all the brighter for her seemingly natural color. Work spills across shelf after shelf, pedestal after pedestal, and onto the walls and floor. It might be coming together or coming apart.
Does her sculpture come in series or as something larger? It depends on where one work ends and another begins. The gallery speaks of two urns as a diptych—and of a long row of them, Conversations on the Shore from 1994, as an installation. (It lends its title to the show.) It would not be a polite or quiet conversation. Work on the wall comes closer to fragments, but with an implied arc linking them and giving them shape.
Her exuberance extends jug handles and a spout into abstraction—and additional planes cut against the roundness of fired clay. Glazing gives way to lacquer, epoxy resin, and paint. Smears and dots fall where they may, with blacks looping around them for a point of brief repose. The painted image may at times cohere into petals or fish, but abstraction is always present and always in question. Smaller dots stain the not quite prevailing whites.
Woodman, whose daughter, Francesca Woodman, is a startling photographer, belongs to a long tradition while creating her own. She has no need for the torments and perfection of black potters in South Carolina—or the imagery of Civil War "face jugs." She departs, too, from the grittier surface textures so common in ceramics today, as with Arlene Shechet. She worked just as Frank Stella was moving from stripes to chaos and from painting to sculpture. Had she become a painter, she might have might have fit just fine with bursts of color in second-generation Abstract Expressionism—and with the tried and true. It earned her a name all the same.
Do her shapes border on human? Just as much, they are about the humanity of pottery and its place in human lives. Planes become arms and hips breaking into dance. If sea blues appear, the medium might have served for a fishbowl or for those onshore conversations. If leaves appear, they might have risen up from their place in a vase. If things have a way of spilling out, so might wine from a Grecian urn, and titles also speak of Athens and a Sala da Pranzo, or dining room. Fragments hint at architecture, as in another series, Balustrade Reliefs.
They ask, too, what it means to be human or, for that matter pottery. Woodman often cuts away, leaving a gap in the shape of an urn. She also depicts classical forms in red, yellow, and black, as urns within urns. Call it self-referential or "meta," if you dare. Compared to trendier artists now, she can seem wilder or more sophisticated. Nearly five years past her death in 2018, she keeps pouring it on.
Naturally ideal
When it comes to art, having seen it all before could be the worst conceivable insult. Anyone who hits the galleries regularly knows that feeling all too well. Try not to struggle with it, though, on encountering Jennifer Paige Cohen. Savor it long enough, and it will hit you twice. What you thought was familiar really is, but also something else again. Her lumpy humanoids are genuine shape shifters.
Now that anything goes, can anything still stand out? What about ceramics, a medium that now turns up ever so often? Here it is again with Cohen, or is it? As with Shechet, her coarse outlines and rough surfaces are not just a refusal of polish, but also the trace of their own making. Only here that means not the mark of the artist's thumb in wet clay, but a progressive layering of plaster and fabric. A predominant white leaves those materials intact, apart from stains and splatters of paint.
Modeling by hand accords with the revival of the black potters of South Carolina. Yet figurative sculpture has its place, too, in fine-art traditions. No wonder Cohen's actors look familiar. They have a natural grace, even as their proportions are anything but ideal. Seated or standing, they seem too proud or too tired to pose, even as they do their best to command attention or to command themselves. It makes them all the more vulnerable in the face of everyday aches and pains.
A walk through the gallery means getting to know her subjects personally, alone and together, however long it takes. Even a solo figure, to trust its title, is Accompanied. If twice were not enough, for plaster and naturalism, discovery kicks in a third time at that. Cohen's heritage includes the ancient world along with the present. What may seem unposed picks up poses that have indeed seen it all, in Roman statuary and on the surfaces of Grecian pottery. She could be taking its inventory.
Well before the latest thing, Woodman quoted Grecian urns in her glazing while introducing pottery as contemporary art. Cohen's figures, though, do not just represent but embody past art. A striding male bears the burden of labor and of showing off, a recumbent female her volume and her grace. Layering of fabric recalls the clothing of ancient statuary as well. Yet they never lose their everyday presence. Familiarity cuts both ways.
Postmodern art turned against both realism and idealism, and postmodern viewers are used to seeing the two in opposition. One cannot understand art's history, though, without seeing things differently. Renaissance art takes both realism and idealism as imperatives, because a god or two walked on earth. Classical art did as well, because only formal perfection could capture the fullness of nature. Neither accords with Woodman's overflowing joy or trendier art's getting in your face, and neither can Cohen. For her, the past is alive because one is conscious of it, and the present is alive because one must put up with it every day.
The black potters of Old Edgefield ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through February 5, 2023, Jennifer Paige Cohen at Nicelle Beauchene through January 14. Betty Woodman ran at David Kordansky through December 17, 2022.