Today is your last chance to see Face Jugs: Art and Ritual in 19th Century South Carolina.

The term “face jug” refers to an African-American pottery type created in the second half of the 19th century, in the midst of slavery, in the Edgefield District of South Carolina.  Face Jugs: Art and Ritual in 19th Century South Carolina will focus on these formative African-American vessels, celebrating the aesthetic power of these potent art forms, while examining  new ways to consider their uses and, perhaps more importantly, their cultural meanings within a community of Americans that lived under the most difficult of circumstances. In light of the new research, the face vessels will be interpreted based on slave life in South Carolina in the middle of the 19th century. Instead of focusing solely on their African qualities, Face Jugs will treat the vessels as uniquely African-American. The vessels will be discussed as functional objects that covertly represented the angst and difficulties associated with being a slave in the Southern plantation, and they will be related to other coded components of slave life such as spirituals and Catholic saint figurines.

Face Jugs:  Art and Ritual in 19th-Century South Carolina is organized by the Chipstone Foundation and the Milwaukee Art Museum, and curated by Claudia Mooney, Assistant Curator of the Chipstone Foundation.