6/19/2023 0 Comments Liberal studies![]() “Being in charge of your own money and therefore your own destiny were illegal for enslaved people in South Carolina, but those laws were countermanded by his enslavers as a novelty,” Foreman said. Though widely recognized as a master potter during his lifetime, Drake was neither granted his freedom nor permitted to buy it until after the Civil War. Today, Drake’s pots - among the largest turned stoneware vessels of the nineteenth century, some as large as 40 gallons - are on display in prominent museums across the country, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Art. “His pots served as his pages,” Foreman said. ![]() “I decided to say ‘yes’ to anything that had to do with poetry that intersected with the 19th century, which is my area of specialty.”įoreman’s “yes” turned into a multi-layered collaboration with internationally renowned dance educator Lynnette Young Overby, award-winning poet Glenis Redmond, and the famous painter Jonathan Green, as well as with other choreographers, composers, dancers, artists and musicians, to commemorate the life and work of David Drake and showcase the work of people who “claim him as an artistic and cultural ancestor.”ĭavid Drake, likely born in 1801, was an enslaved South Carolina potter who often penned couplets and verses on some of his pots, signing his work as “Dave” in large letters at a time when literacy was outlawed for those enslaved in the state. “When my father passed away, I started working with artists and dancers to fill the void of his enormous intellectual and creative and cultural energy,” Foreman said. When her father died in 2010, Foreman honored his memory by embarking on a decade-long creative endeavor that culminated in her recently released edited volume, “Praise Songs for Dave the Potter: Art and Poetry for David Drake” (University of Georgia Press). ![]() Poet Kent Foreman - once called the “elder statesman of the spoken word” by the Chicago Tribune - had a profound influence on his daughter, Gabrielle Foreman, Paterno Family Professor of American Literature and professor of African American studies and history at Penn State and a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. ![]()
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