The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has restored ownership of a nearly 200-year-old stoneware jug to the descendants of David Drake, the enslaved South Carolina potter who made it, before repurchasing the piece from his family. The agreement, announced this week, marks the first time in VMFA's history that it has recognized descendants of an enslaved person as the rightful owners of a work in its collection.
Drake created the double-handled jug in 1840 while enslaved at the South Carolina pottery operation of Lewis J. Miles, according to Axios. Miles enslaved Drake and profited from his labor at a time when Drake, as an enslaved artist, could not legally own or profit from his own pottery. The jug later passed through multiple collectors in the Deep South before VMFA acquired it in September 2017. Drake's descendants reached out to the museum earlier this year about ownership of the piece, after working for years to restore rightful ownership of his works, and the museum agreed to recognize the family's claim before repurchasing the jug from them.
Jug's design and poem reveal both danger and skill
Drake inscribed the jug with a verse on January 29, 1840: “Ladys & gentlemens shoes / sell all you can: & nothing you'll loose.” South Carolina had outlawed teaching enslaved people to read or write six years earlier, in 1834, which means the act of incising original verse into wet clay carried real legal risk. The jug is one of only 40 known poem vessels Drake created and was his first known vessel signed and inscribed with a poem, and scholars believe it was likely inspired by a nearby tannery owned by Miles himself, per Axios. Scholars have described Drake's inscribed poetry and signatures as acts of resistance and an assertion of authorship under a system designed to erase both.
VMFA Director and CEO Alex Nyerges said the repurchase recognized Drake's artistic achievements and honored his dignity and memory. The museum funded the purchase through its privately funded endowment and declined to share the price it paid. Double-handled stoneware jugs like this one were common across the Deep South because of their storage capacity, but Axios notes that Drake's jug stands out for its perfectly symmetrical handles, which the museum says demonstrate his immense skill as a ceramicist. Drake continued making pottery after emancipation, though known vessels from his free years do not bear the signatures, dates or poetry that distinguish his enslaved-era work, and scholars do not know why.
A Family's Fourth-Great-Grandson Speaks
Yaba Baker, Drake's fourth-great-grandson, said the agreement honors Drake as an ancestor whose voice, skill and creativity endured for more than 175 years. The jug remains on public display in VMFA's American art galleries in Richmond, where visitors can still see the work firsthand even as its ownership history has been rewritten.
Part Of A Growing National Reckoning
VMFA's move joins a small but growing group of museums restoring ownership of Drake's work to his descendants, with institutions in Boston, Georgia and Milwaukee reaching similar agreements over the past year, according to Axios. The movement traces back to October 2025, when the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston became the first U.S. museum to return artwork made by an enslaved American, transferring ownership of two 1857 stoneware vessels to Drake's heirs using ethical restitution standards previously applied to Holocaust-looted art, as reported by The Art Newspaper. In Boston's agreement, the museum transferred ownership to Drake's heirs and issued a certificate of ethical ownership, while arranging for the vessels to remain accessible to the public.
Legal advocacy for these claims runs through the Dave the Potter Legacy Trust LLC, which Drake's family organized earlier in 2025 after a 2021 auction underscored just how disconnected his descendants were from the value of his work, according to Smithsonian Magazine. That auction saw an 1858 four-handled, 25-gallon signed poem jar sell for $1.56 million to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, a world auction record for American stoneware that drew bids from four major U.S. museums, per Crocker Farm.
Milwaukee And Georgia Set Recent Precedents
The trust's most recent success came in September 2026, when the Milwaukee Art Museum transferred ownership of two 19th-century ceramic jars to the trust, then repurchased one vessel while keeping a second on long-term loan. The same Smithsonian Magazine report notes both pieces remain on public view as part of an educational project. In July 2026, the Georgia Museum of Art set a Southern precedent of its own, transferring ownership of a 19th-century 4-gallon jar to Drake's heirs before repurchasing it and receiving a second vessel on loan, an agreement that the Georgia museum said gave the family a central role in stewardship and exhibition decisions.
Scholars estimate roughly 250 of Drake's ceramic vessels survive today across public and private collections, with about 40 bearing his original rhyming poetry, according to the Georgia Museum of Art. He was one of very few enslaved American artisans known to have signed and dated his work. As Hyperallergic notes, South Carolina's 1740 Negro Act and the later 1834 anti-literacy statutes criminalized reading and writing among enslaved people under threat of severe corporal punishment, while also barring Black individuals from earning money or traveling freely — making Drake's incised verses explicit acts of defiance.
The Industrial Scale Behind Edgefield Pottery
Drake worked within a production system built almost entirely on enslaved labor. He was among roughly 75 enslaved turners working in 19th-century Edgefield, South Carolina, where potters produced storage vessels holding up to 40 gallons, according to Antique Trader. Archaeologists excavating the Pottersville site in Edgefield in 2011 uncovered a 105-foot-long dragon kiln.
The VMFA agreement follows closely on the heels of Hoodline's earlier report on the Milwaukee museum's own restitution, part of the same wave of agreements now reaching from Boston to Richmond. American museums have recognized descendants of enslaved people as rightful owners in only a handful of cases nationwide, which is part of why VMFA's decision — its first claim involving art made under slavery — is being watched as a marker of how far the field still has to go.
