ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
Join our resident artist Jim McDowell to personalize your own Face Jug. Will you make your jug scary, silly, sweet, or a little of each? Each participant receives a blank jug Jim throws beforehand - along with clay to create features and embellishments. "One firing" glazes and tools will also be provided. Finished pieces will be returned to BRAHM within 3 weeks for pickup by participants. No experience is required.
Face Jugs were created by African peoples who were slaves in the United States early in the nineteenth century. Jugs were made and found in the Carolinas and Georgia. The tradition of face jugs has thrived in the North Carolina Piedmont and foothills today with a vibrant community of potters and collectors.
About the Artist:
I call myself the Black Potter. Seems appropriate, not only because I am a potter who is a Black man, but because in my world of pottery, I have learned from, taught, sold to, and worked with mostly white people. I stand out.
I studied art at Mt. Aloysius College and took sculpture courses at Virginia Commonwealth, but in pottery, I am pretty much self-taught or at least without formal education. When I was stationed at Ansbach, Germany while in the Army, I had a part-time job at the base craft shop where I saw a pottery wheel. No one there could tell me how to use it, but they said the German potters were at Nuremberg. I hopped a bus, went to that town, and found them. But when I showed them what I wanted, and with my scant German pointed to a wheel, they said “Nein,” and one handed me a broom. My dad had taught me to work for what I wanted so I ignored the racist gesture and swept that floor every Saturday for a few weekends until one of the guys sat me down at the wheel and showed me a few basics. I was hooked.
When I went back to Pennsylvania, where I had worked in a coal mine before going into the Army, I resumed work there in the mines. I took a whole paycheck one Friday and bought myself a wheel and a thousand pounds of clay. Then I got to work. All I could produce were odd objects that looked like weapons or doorstops. I took a few pottery classes, then, a breakthrough—a workshop with the potter David Robinson in Weare, New Hampshire. I signed up for one week and stayed for two. His teachings were the foundation of all I have done since. But in the ensuing thirty-five years or more, I had the privilege of learning from and working with many of the best— Jack Troy, Kevin Crowe, David Hovland, David Shaner, and Charles Counts.
Within a year or so after I learned the wheel fairly well, I decided to make one of those face jugs I’d heard about so many years before when I was at a family funeral. If my four-time Great Aunt Evangeline made them, maybe I should make them, too. I’ve never stopped, but the face jugs have evolved over the years, taking on the characteristics of nearly everything I’ve seen, heard, felt, and am feeling now—the anger, the injustices, the inequities, the feeling that Black lives did not matter. But also the achievements, inventions, courageous acts of so many, all forms of resistance to the system. I’ve honored Maya Angelou, Demond Tutu, Harriet Tubman, Fannie Lou Hammer, John Lewis, and many others.
I want to believe that times are changing, that the Black Lives Matter movement will be the new Civil Rights Era when my dad sat by the door of our house in Washington D.C. during the riots with a gun to protect us. But out of that came change. I have mostly been the Black Potter in a white world that supported me but lived also in the Black world where I saw tragedy, living while Black. I’m the fulcrum, obliged to balance it all. I’m still plumbing the depths of my artistic vision. I feel freer than ever to tell the story of my people with clay and my bare hands. And I’ll keep on doing it.
More of Jim’s work may be viewed online at BlackPotter.com
This workshop is funded in part by a grant from South Arts in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and North Carolina Arts Council.