This jug is from the Edgefield vicinity of South Carolina.  Face jugs were created by slaves but we know little about them.  In many places it was illegal for slaves to write.  Thomas Davies, a plantation owner in South Carolina, told Edwin Atlee Barber in 1893 that he remembered his slaves making face jugs during their free time in 1862.  These were made by slaves for slaves and are a direct link to art forms in Africa.  Face jugs were spiritual items not functional.  It is currently believed they were used for conjuring and that they were directly linked to the Kongo culture's nkisi.     

A  nkisi is a portable shrines designed to house a spiritual power.  The Nkisi had openings and were, in a sense, containers for spiritual objects and medicines.  In this nkisi, the opening is covered with a cowrie shell.  Male nkisi are meant to look aggressive and are driven with hardware.  These nails and pegs represent disputes that have been settled by the spirit.  Mangaaka, the king and master, was the personification of an abstract force charged with the arbitration of trade disputes. The nkisis Mangaaka arose during the 19th century as colonial incursions increased.  He was the supreme adjudicator of conflicts and protector of communities across the Chiloango River region. Mangaaka features attributes of chieftaincy and a physicality that could obliterate those who defy authority and the rule of law. Its displeasure was manifested through chest ailments and spitting blood. It likewise had the power to cure these literally and symbolically acute physical ailments. Slightly under life-size, the carving of Mangaaka’s figurative container required the talents and experience of a master sculptor.  

Famous in his day and known as the best landscape painter of the West, Duncanson, an African American, left the United States during the Civil War for Europe.  On his way, he spent two years in Canada where he established an art school for landscape painting.  

Duncanson was born circa 1821 in Fayette, New York, into a family of free African-Americans skilled in carpentry and house painting.  As a teenager, he went to work as a house-painter and taught himself artistic painting.   

Do you think the artist is representing reality or a glossed over version of slavery?  

The scene is from the Dutch colony of Surinam, where Valkenburg was sent by a plantation owner to spend several years painting plantation life.  Valkenburg returned after only two years due to illness.  

The painting shows a party scene.  The people in the painting are believed to have been individual slaves that modelled for the painting.  Nevertheless, we know nothing about these people, not their names, relationships to one another, etc.  The painting also lends itself to perpetuating the myth of the happy slave.  Slavery is frequently whitewashed in a number of different ways, from making slaves look happy and content with being held in bondage by their "paternalistic" masters, .    

Goree is a small island off Dakar, Senegal.  From the 15th to the 19th century, it was the largest slave-trading centre on the African coast. Ruled in succession by the Portuguese, Dutch, English and French, its architecture is characterized by the contrast between the grim slave-quarters and the elegant houses of the slave traders. 

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This was where the West Africans brought the people they captured and purchased from other West, Central, and East Africa cultures.  Until the abolition of the trade in the French colonies in the mid1800s, the Island was a warehouse consisting of over a dozen slave houses. 

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Charles Maurand (1824-1904) was a lithographer, woodcutter, illustrator, who worked in France and the USA until 1881.

David Drake was an enslaved African American in Edgefield, South Carolina where African Americans developed a strong pottery tradition from 1815 - 1880.  These potters included slaves and freed blacks.  Of these "Dave the Potter" aka "Dave the Slave" is the most famous.  He’s known today for the magnificent quality of the pots he made, the size of the pots (20 -40 gallons and up to 2 feet tall), and signing his wares.  Not ony did he sign his pots, but he wrote poems and couplets on some of his pots—during an era when it was a crime for slaves to know how to read and write.  His writing includes commentary on his daily life and his religious views, as well as commentary on slavery.  

This pot reads: “L.m. nover 3, 1858/ Dave.”  The other is marked “I saw a leopard & a lions face/ then I felt the need – of grace,” an adaptation from the Book of Revelation.

David Drake was born into slavery in 1801, his owner owned a factory plantation that specialized in alkaline glaze stoneware.  Drake learned to read and write by working as a typesetter at The Edgefield Hive, the local newspaper which another one of his owners ran. Throughout his life, Drake was moved to several different Pottersville factories by his various owners until his emancipation at the end of the Civil War.

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