Curating Edgefield

Follow along as curators from The Met, MFA Boston, and the University of Michigan co-develop a traveling exhibition focused on the work of African American potters in the 19th-century American South, and the contemporary artists who have responded to it.

University of Michigan History Professor Jason Young, Metropolitan Museum of Art Assistant Curator Adrienne Spinozzi, and Museum of Fine Arts Boston Head of Art of the Americas Ethan Lasser are co-curating Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina, an exhibition set to open at the Met in September 2022. They are advised and supported by a national board of artists and scholars who offer invaluable input and perspectives, throughout both the planning and development process.

Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina is an exhibition focused on the work of African American potters in the 19th-century American South and the contemporary artists who have responded to it. Organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the exhibition is a groundbreaking presentation of approximately 60 ceramic objects from Edgefield, South Carolina, a center of ceramic production in the decades before the Civil War. Considered through the lens of recent scholarship in the fields of history, literature, anthropology, diaspora, material culture, and African American studies, these 19th-century wares testify to the artistic ambitions, lived experiences, and material knowledge of enslaved peoples and the realities of slavery in the industrial context.  

Hear Me Now offers a novel view of an underrepresented aspect of American enslavement, foregrounding objects made by enslaved potters and bringing this important history to larger audiences. Additionally, it aspires to link past to present, in part by including the work of leading contemporary Black artists who have responded to the Edgefield story, such as Simone Leigh and Woody De Othello, among others.