The Intersection of Black Lives Matter and Ceramic Dishware Culture

Imagine a dinner table where every plate, bowl, and mug quietly insists that Black lives, histories, and futures matter. No slogan stamped across a salad plate, no screaming typography—just clay, glaze, and form holding centuries of resistance, memory, and joy.

As a Colorful Tabletop Creative & Pragmatic Joy Curator, I live for that intersection: the moment when a lovingly set table becomes more than decor and steps into the realm of cultural storytelling and everyday activism. Black Lives Matter is often framed as marches, policy change, and urgent headlines. Ceramic dishware culture is often dismissed as “just plates.” But the research on Black pottery, African and Native traditions, and museum collections shows that clay has long been a frontline where Black life is erased, caricatured, defended, and celebrated.

In this article, we will walk through that history, then come back to the table with practical ways to choose and use dishware that aligns with the spirit of Black Lives Matter—without sacrificing color, playfulness, or the pure pleasure of a beautiful meal.

Clay as Archive: Black Life Fired into Stoneware

Ceramics scholars and museums repeatedly remind us that pots are not neutral. The High Museum of Art’s exhibition on the Black potters of Old Edgefield in South Carolina describes a landscape of “industrial slavery,” where enslaved African Americans spent about half a century before emancipation producing tens of thousands of stoneware storage vessels each year for plantations across South Carolina and parts of Georgia. These jars, with their glassy, impervious glazes, were daily tools for food and water, but they were also records of coercion and expertise.

Archaeological and historical research compiled in works like the SAGE Encyclopedia of African Cultural Heritage in North America and African pottery histories shows that African potting traditions are among the oldest in the world, stretching back around eleven thousand years in regions like central Mali. Long before the word “ceramics” sounded academic, clay cooking and storage vessels helped shape African cuisines and foodways, allowing people to boil stews longer, store grain more safely, and manage scarcity. That knowledge traveled with enslaved Africans to the Americas, even when their names and languages were violently severed.

In many African societies, potting was traditionally women’s work. Among the Shai of southeast Ghana, girls learned pottery during puberty rites that lasted years. Shai potters developed around thirty-five distinct pot types, and by the nineteen sixties their annual production exceeded half a million vessels, largely for markets. When descendants of these communities were forced into slavery in the Americas, they carried a deeply gendered and spiritually charged relationship to clay.

So when you lift a humble stoneware serving bowl, you are not holding a bland “craft object.” You are handling a form that has been central to African and African diasporic survival, cooking, and identity for millennia. Black Lives Matter asks us to notice how structures treat Black people; ceramics research shows that the kitchen and pantry have always been part of that story.

Enslaved Potters, Face Jugs, and Written Resistance

The Edgefield District in South Carolina offers a sharp example of how Black creativity under slavery resonates with Black Lives Matter today. Historians working with the High Museum and scholars of African American craft have documented enslaved potters who ran almost every stage of that stoneware industry, even though they were rarely named.

One exception is David Drake, often called Dave the Potter, whose work has been examined by institutions such as the Huntington. Over roughly forty years, Drake made thousands of large alkaline-glazed stoneware jars. Against South Carolina laws that attempted to bar Black literacy, he wrote names, dates, Christian phrases, and short poems directly onto his pots.

On one jar he inscribed a couplet that wonders where all his relations are, alongside a wish for friendship across nations. These inscriptions turn a storage jar into a loud refusal of erasure. They are nineteenth-century “Black Lives Matter” messages etched into clay, insisting that an enslaved Black man could think, write, believe, and grieve even while being treated as property.

Other Edgefield forms, such as the famous face jugs, carry equally potent meaning. Research published through the Chipstone Foundation links these vessels to Central African Bakongo spiritual traditions. In Bakongo practice, ritual objects called minkisi (singular nkisi) are containers—horns, bundles, wooden figures, or ceramics—filled with materials believed to hold spiritual power related to ancestors and the land of the dead.

A Mu-Kongo definition from around nineteen hundred describes an nkisi as both a healing tool and a “hiding place for people’s souls.” Edgefield face jugs, with their exaggerated features and white kaolin eyes, echo these forms. Art historians like Robert Farris Thompson argue that they are not simply grotesque caricatures, but creolized ritual objects that merge Euro-American stoneware technology with African aesthetics and ritual logics.

When you serve water or wine from a contemporary jug inspired by these traditions, you are drawing on a lineage where containers were not just functional but protective, mediating between the living and the dead. Black Lives Matter, viewed through this lens, is not just about legal rights; it is also about honoring the spiritual and emotional technologies Black people developed to survive a world organized around making their lives disposable.

After Emancipation: Black-Owned Potteries and Community Infrastructure

The story does not end with emancipation. Research highlighted by Ceramic School and the Atlanta History Center traces how formerly enslaved craftspeople turned clay into economic and community power.

In Texas, five formerly enslaved Freedmen—Hiram, James, Wallace, George, and Andrew Wilson—founded H. Wilson and Company Pottery on land granted by their former enslaver. This enterprise is noted as the first Black-owned business in Texas. Led by Hiram Wilson, the pottery produced large quantities of durable, salt-glazed functional wares. They innovated horseshoe-shaped handles that hugged the vessel to reduce breakage and redesigned rims for better sealing and food preservation. Even more radical, they marked their wares with potters’ stamps at a time when such signatures were unusual. Every stamped jar quietly declared that Black craftsmanship and ownership belonged in the marketplace.

Broader histories of Black craftsmanship show how potters, blacksmiths, woodworkers, and textile workers used their skills as community infrastructure. In the decades after emancipation, these artisans helped fund and build Black churches and schools, maintained networks through mobile craft work, and translated technical skill into political influence. In pottery, Southern Black makers blended influences from Bakongo, Wolof, Malinke, Sarakole, and Yoruba traditions into grave adornments and expressive face vessels connected to protective Bakongo nkisi concepts.

If Black Lives Matter today calls for economic justice and the building of Black-led institutions, these nineteenth-century potteries and workshops were early blueprints. A casserole dish made by a Black ceramicist, in that light, is not a lifestyle accessory; it is part of a much longer effort to re-route value into Black hands.

When Ceramics Degrade Instead of Defend Black Life

Black Lives Matter also asks us to confront the objects that normalize anti-Blackness. A powerful example comes from research discussed by the Victoria and Albert Museum, which holds many racist ceramic ornaments produced by white European makers. These pieces caricature Black people, glamorize slavery-linked commodities like sugar and tobacco, and turn Black bodies into decorative motifs.

Art historian Adrienne Childs has analyzed the concept of “ornamental blackness” and figures known as blackamoors, where Black figures are designed as luxurious servants or exotic props. In elite porcelain, such as some Meissen pieces, Black women are shown holding sweetmeat bowls, transforming the brutal labor of enslaved Africans in sugar fields into dainty table fantasies for white diners. Dessert literally sits in a sculpted representation of the people whose suffering made that sweetness possible.

Contemporary artists push back on this legacy using ceramic and tableware forms themselves. Theaster Gates, in projects like “A Clay Sermon,” works with racist tobacco jars and other “negrobilia” from collections amassed by families like Ana and Edward Williams, reframing them as evidence rather than quaint collectibles. Artist Jacqueline Bishop reworks fine bone china to overlay imagery of enslaved Jamaican women with lush local flora and fauna, exposing the violence beneath “beautiful” tableware.

Museums like the Victoria and Albert Museum now argue that hiding racist ceramics is not the answer. Instead, they collaborate with artists and scholars, especially people of color, to display these objects critically, rewrite labels, and use them in anti-racist education. That museum practice mirrors Black Lives Matter’s insistence on telling the whole story rather than preserving a sanitized public memory.

For a home curator, this raises a practical question: what do you do with heirloom plates or figurines that depict Black people in degrading ways? A Black Lives Matter approach might mean removing them from everyday display, contextualizing them when they are shown, and actively seeking work by Black makers and artists of color to take pride of place.

Identity and Belonging: Who Gets to Make the Dishes?

At a major ceramics conference in the United States in the mid two thousand teens, artist Theaster Gates once asked a crowd of more than four thousand people to stand if they identified as African American. Fewer than forty stood. Ceramics Monthly describes this moment as a jolt that exposed how underrepresented Black artists are in clay.

In response, artist Heidi McKenzie organized a panel titled “Paradox: Identity and Belonging,” featuring mixed-race ceramic artists Brendan Tang, Jennifer Datchuk, and Nathan Murray. McKenzie draws on feminist geographer Gillian Rose’s idea of “paradoxical space” to describe how mixed-race people live in an “in-between” zone, neither neatly categorized nor fully accepted. In clay, she uses marbled bodies and agateware to embody plural identities and challenge viewers to look past skin.

Jennifer Datchuk, with Russian, Irish, and Chinese American heritage, talks about always being asked “What are you?” She leans into porcelain—the material historically tied both to Chinese history and to Western ideals of fragile, white purity—and sometimes embeds her own hair into the clay as a metaphor for camouflage and mutable identity. Nathan Murray, who is both Black and white, creates life-size busts that address passing, colorism, and the pressure to appear “Black enough,” situating his work in the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and ongoing white supremacy.

In South Africa, a different but related story unfolds. Under apartheid, Black and multiracial artists were largely barred from fine arts education and pushed into underfunded vocational tracks. Ceramic traditions by Black makers were documented, if at all, through anthropology and ethnology rather than art history, reinforcing a colonial divide between “art” and “craft.” Researchers writing about South African ceramics describe how, even after formal apartheid ended in 1994, many Black ceramicists still face structural barriers in education, gallery access, and markets.

Organizations such as Ceramics Southern Africa are attempting to counter this through more inclusive leadership, subsidized exhibition opportunities, and programs like internships and skill-sharing projects that prioritize Black and multiracial makers. Galleries like Southern Guild in Cape Town foreground African ceramics and design on a global stage, explicitly committed to addressing historical imbalances while acknowledging that full equity is still a work in progress.

When Black Lives Matter presses for representation, these ceramic histories answer with very specific questions: who gets art school training, who gets gallery representation, whose plates end up in museum vitrines, and whose work is left on the “craft” table at a street fair?

Black and Indigenous Ceramic Traditions on the Table Today

To bring this back to colorful tabletops, it helps to remember that contemporary Black ceramicists and Indigenous makers are building on deep lineage, not trends.

In the American Southwest, Pueblo potters like Maria Martinez of San Ildefonso Pueblo revived and refined black-on-black ware in the early twentieth century. This style features matte designs painted in slip over a polished black surface, achieved through reduction firing that turns red clay black. Martinez worked closely with family members to reconstruct older techniques, and her success created economic opportunities for her community while making Pueblo pottery iconic in mainstream art markets.

Across the African continent, traditions are equally rich and varied. Scholars and writers on African pottery note early Sahara ceramics dating to around ten thousand years before the present, hand-built without wheels and fired in open pits. Regional styles range from Nok terracotta figures in what is now Nigeria, to patterned wares of Gumba and Aksum in East Africa, to Zulu ukhamba beer pots in southern Africa. Many of these traditions rely on coiling and hand shaping, burnishing with stones or seeds, and surface decoration that encodes social status, spiritual beliefs, or cultural stories.

In southern Africa, the Nala and Magwaza families, spanning multiple generations of women potters, maintain refined Zulu techniques such as hand-coiling, open firing, and characteristic amasumpa pellet decorations formed as raised textures. In Nigeria, Ladi Kwali blended traditional forming methods with glazing and fine carving, adorning her vessels with animal and plant motifs and becoming so celebrated that her image appeared on national currency.

Contemporary artists continue to push these legacies forward. Kenyan-born Magdalene Odundo creates fluid, non-functional vessels using coiling and carefully controlled firing, referencing female bodies and African ceramic traditions while working in Britain. South African artist Andile Dyalvane incorporates Xhosa scarification patterns into his surfaces and uses performance-like installations of terracotta seating forms to evoke ancestral dreamscapes. Nigerian American artist Osa Atoe draws on West African heritage, Nok-influenced line work, and inspirations from Black ceramic elders like David MacDonald and Jabu Nala to make functional pieces meant to be touched, used, and shared at the table.

Seen through a Black Lives Matter lens, these artists are not just adding “global flair” to your cupboard. They are asserting that Black and Indigenous ceramic knowledge is sophisticated, contemporary, and worthy of everyday intimacy. Choosing their work for your dinner table is one small but real way of shifting attention and resources toward those lives and lineages.

Everyday Dishware as an Act of Solidarity

So how do you turn all this history into a table that feels like joy rather than homework? Here is how I think about it when I style a BLM-conscious tabletop that still feels inviting and playful.

First, I consider who made the objects and whose stories they echo. A simple mug by a Black potter working in the tradition of African American stoneware or African coil-built forms carries different weight than a factory-produced mug with a trendy slogan. When I can, I prioritize pieces by Black artists and Indigenous makers whose work connects to the traditions described by institutions such as the SAGE Encyclopedia, Studio Potter, or contemporary African pottery research. The money you spend on dishware can quietly help pay rent in a Black artist’s life rather than only fueling anonymous mass production.

Second, I think about how form and decoration can prompt conversation. A black-on-black-inspired serving bowl might lead you to tell guests about Maria Martinez and how her experiments with firing techniques brought economic opportunities back to San Ildefonso Pueblo. A lidded jar with raised pellet textures reminiscent of Zulu amasumpa could invite a story about the Nala and Magwaza families and African women’s central role in pottery. A heavy stoneware jar with carved lines might open the door to sharing David Drake’s inscribed couplets and the fact that an enslaved man claimed his literacy on the body of a jar.

Third, I am careful about avoiding decorative objects that caricature Black people or turn Black bodies into exotic décor. That includes antique figurines, blackamoor-style candleholders, or novelty jugs. If such pieces appear in the home, I treat them as evidence of racist histories and only display them with context, not as whimsical accents.

Finally, I design for pleasure. Plates and bowls that invoke African or diasporic traditions are inherently joyful: terracotta surfaces that look like warm earth, burnished pots that glow like polished stone, graphic patterns that dance under bright salads and stews. A BLM-aligned table should still feel like a place where laughter, delicious food, and celebration live. Justice and delight are not opposites; they are ingredients that season each other.

Pros and Cons of Turning Your Table into a BLM Space

Approaching your ceramic dishware through a Black Lives Matter lens has clear strengths. You support Black and Indigenous artists and small studios, often helping to sustain the very traditions documented by historians and museums. Your table becomes a living classroom where stories of Augusta Savage, Hiram Wilson, Ladi Kwali, David Drake, or Maria Martinez can be told and retold. Family members and guests—especially children—absorb the idea that Black artistry belongs at the center of beauty, not at its margins.

There are also real challenges. Handmade ceramics are often more expensive than mass-produced sets, and not everyone can or wants to invest in a full cupboard of studio pieces. Some people are nervous about using “special” pottery for daily meals, worrying about chips or breakage. Conversations about slavery, racial caricature, or ongoing inequality can feel heavy at a dinner party, especially when people’s comfort levels vary.

There is also the risk of superficiality or appropriation if non-Black hosts buy Black or African-inspired wares without learning the stories behind them or without supporting the communities that created those forms. A single vase cannot stand in for sustained engagement with anti-racist work, and no collection of plates eliminates the need for policy change or mutual aid.

The pragmatic approach is to see ceramics as one channel among many. Start small: one or two pieces by Black or Indigenous makers that you love enough to use regularly. Learn the stories of those forms from sources such as the High Museum, the Atlanta History Center, Ceramics Monthly, or the SAGE and Oxford research overviews on ceramics, foodways, and African history. Share the stories in ways that fit the mood—sometimes a deep dive, sometimes a passing note as you refill someone’s bowl. Let the table be a conversation starter, not a perfect solution.

A Quick Visual Map of Clay and Black Lives Matter

Short FAQ

Do I need explicitly “BLM-branded” plates to support Black Lives Matter at my table?

Not at all. In fact, the deepest alignment usually comes from supporting Black and Indigenous makers, learning the histories behind their forms, and using those pieces as everyday tools rather than slogans. A quiet, beautifully thrown bowl by a Black potter that you reach for every morning is more powerful than a mass-produced mug with a catchphrase that never invites deeper conversation.

Is it appropriate for non-Black people to collect and use ceramics tied to Black and African traditions?

Yes, if you approach them with respect. That means buying from reputable sources that credit and compensate artists and communities, taking time to learn the context from scholars and institutions, and being willing to talk about those histories when people admire your pieces. The line between appreciation and appropriation is often about power, context, and reciprocity rather than ownership alone.

When you next set a table—whether for solo brunch or a packed holiday dinner—imagine each piece of clay as a tiny stage. On some, the script is ancient, fired by African women whose names we will never know. On others, the lines are written by enslaved potters like David Drake, by Pueblo innovators like Maria Martinez, by Black women like Ladi Kwali and Selma Burke, by contemporary makers from Osa Atoe to Andile Dyalvane.

Let your plates and bowls say, in their own earthy, glazed language, that Black lives have always shaped how we cook, serve, and celebrate. Then pour something good, pass it around, and let that truth sit in everyone’s hands.

References

1. https://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/whats-on/forthcoming/the-lives-and-legacies-of-black-women-ceramicists
2. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/8efa4f16-44bf-4dc1-9db6-a67328562236/content
3. https://studiopotter.org/african-art-traditional-and-contemporary-pottery
4. https://www.huntington.org/verso/resistance-and-resilience-clay-how-enslaved-african-american-potters-gave-shape-their-lives
5. https://www.aic-iac.org/wp-content/uploads/Ronnie-Watt_2020_PhD.pdf
6. https://ceramicartsnetwork.org/ceramics-monthly/ceramics-monthly-article/Paradox-Identity-and-Belonging
7. https://www.ceramicsnow.org/articles/shaping-visibility-reflecting-on-representation-in-south-african-ceramics/
8. https://high.org/exhibition/hear-me-now/
9. https://www.chipstone.org/article.php/537/Ceramics-in-America-2013/African-American-Face-Vessels:-History-and-Ritual-in-19th-Century-Edgefield
10. https://www.contemporary-african-art.com/contemporary-african-pottery.html