“Remembrance” opens at Acline Studios Gallery on Sept. 27

Artist: Jim McDowell

Location: Acline Studios Gallery

Dates: September 27, 2024 – January 11, 2025

Opening Reception: September 27, 2024 | 6-8pm

Artwork Statement

“I make face jugs out of clay. Not the folk art style popularized in the early 1900s by potters in the Southern states, but face jugs with Black features like thick lips and broad noses, sometimes kinky hair or twists or braids. My jugs have themes of liberation. I honor Black activists, inventors, and creators.  I call myself the Black Potter. Recently, one journalist named me the “Ceramic Activist,” and I like it.

Often, my jugs are ugly because slavery was ugly. I first heard about face jugs when I was in my teens from my grandfather. He told me about my four-times Great Aunt Evangeline who was a slave potter in Jamaica who made face jugs. In African traditions, the jugs were used in spiritual practices, sometimes used to mark a grave. I connect with my ancestors when I make these jugs, not only to honor them but to honor their descendants, people like John Lewis, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and many many others. I write messages on my jugs the way the enslaved potter David Drake wrote poetry on the large functional pots he made. He was an activist just by doing so since it was illegal for him to write.

Over the years, I’ve sold hundreds of face jugs through shows and galleries, but more recently to art collectors and museums. Lately, I’ve gotten a lot of attention in the news media…Architectural Digest, Smithsonian Magazine, Wallpaper Magazine, even British Vogue and Elle Décor. It helps to spread the word about the jugs. But my intent and message will never change. We must resist racism and hatred. The face jugs are my way of doing this. This is how I stand up for my people.”

About the Artist

A studio potter for over thirty-five years, known for creating face jugs with Black features and activist statements, Jim McDowell was listed as one of “300 Names Defining the U.S.A.‘s Creative Landscape,” as a “Keeper of Culture” in Wallpaper Magazine, August 2023. As the four-times great-nephew of an enslaved Jamaican potter named Evangeline, who made face jugs, he connects his work to the spiritual rituals of African potters once enslaved in America and the Caribbean Islands.

Recent shows include “The New North State” (SOCO Gallery, Charlotte, NC, 2024); “A Gathering: Work from Contemporary Black American Ceramic Artists” (Northern Clay Center national tour, 2022-2024); “Object &  Thing Goes to the Beach” (Longhouse Reserve in East Hampton, 2023); and, “Jagged Path: the African Diaspora in Western North Carolina in Craft, Music, and Dance” (Blowing Rock Art and History Museum, 2022). He’s been featured in many magazines and books over the years, including the recent Contemporary Black American Ceramic Artists by Chotsani Elaine Dean and Donald A. Clark, published by Schiffer and Hear Me Now, The Black Potters OF Old Edgefield, South Carolina, published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in conjunction with the show of the same name.

Museums that own his work as part of a permanent collection include the Nasher Museum at Duke University, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Krannert Museum of Art at the University of Illinois, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh, and the Birmingham Museum of Art.

Jim McDowell works out of his home studio in Weaverville, NC. 

Artist Jim McDowell in his studio. Photo by Jack Robert.