American Folk Art & Framing presents a studio filled with personality this month as the 14th Annual Face Jug Show opens online Wednesday, May 6, at 11 a.m. and in the gallery on Thursday, May 7, at 11 a.m., with a reception from 5-8 p.m. during downtown Asheville’s Mosaic ArtWalk & Benefit. The exhibition runs through Wednesday, May 27.
This yearly show brings together a panoply of expressive jugs representing the cultures of potters and the history of the face jug making tradition. “In the Appalachian region, face jug folklore claims these vessels would use snakes, grimacing faces or devil horns to frighten children away from the alcohol that often would be stored inside,” says gallery owner Julia Mills. “The roots of the tradition, however, run much deeper, derived from a practice that came to America with enslaved Africans. Placing a face vessel as a grave marker was meant to ward off evil spirits to allow the soul of the dead to peacefully transition to the next world.”
Potter Jim McDowell traces his lineage and his chosen craft back to his four times great-aunt Evangeline who was a slave potter in Jamaica. McDowell has been making pottery for more than 40 years and wasn’t familiar with the Southern folk art tradition of face jug making when he began. “In Johnstown, PA, where I was living at the time,” he says, “I saw a student piece that was a face jug and thought I could make one of those, only with Black features.” His work has since become part of permanent collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
One of his newer pieces depicts notable Black Civil Rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who was a victim of a forced sterilization in Mississippi in 1961. McDowell says a friend noted the resemblance of his design to fertility dolls in Ghana. “I had no idea,” he says, “but I see how appropriate that design is now to represent Hamer. Many times my subconscious or maybe my muse or the ancestors take over and make connections I don’t see until later.”
What distinguishes his jugs, he says, are Black features, tribal markings—and cigars. “My cigar is a symbol of resistance, as few enslaved folks were allowed the use of tobacco,” McDowell says. “The 12-year-old son of a slaveholder could smoke and be then considered a man. But a 90-year-old Black man was still called, ‘boy.’” While his jugs do not represent spiritual connections, he says, “they embody the spirit of 400 years of slavery and the truth of where we are now. As a Black artist, I’m always impressed by the ability of my ancestors to tell their stories through their work. I tell the story. I tell the history that has been erased, that’s been kept out of the history books.”…