Virtual Discussion: Art a la Carte with Jim McDowell, ‘The Black Potter’

Enjoy a virtual lunchtime discussion hosted by Sand Hill Artists Collective + Artsville Collective with talented ceramicist Jim McDowell, as he shares his story and gives insight into the creation process behind his well-known Face Jugs. This event is free for all art lovers. Participate to your comfort level or just sit back and enjoy learning about Jim and his fascinating background.

This event will take place on Zoom from 12-1pm. Join with the information below:

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84161940584?pwd=dDhiL3lrd2dMQUlpNEptSEE4NTRHQT09

Meeting ID: 841 6194 0584
Passcode: Artsville

About Jim McDowell:

“I call myself the Black Potter. Seems appropriate, not only because I am a potter who is a Black man, but because in my world of pottery, I have learned from, taught, sold to, and worked with mostly white people. I stand out.

I studied art at Mt. Aloysius College and took sculpture courses at Virginia Commonwealth, but in pottery, I am pretty much self-taught or at least without formal education. When I was stationed at Ansbach, Germany while in the Army, I had a part time job at the base craft shop where I saw a pottery wheel. No one there could tell me how to use it, but they said the German potters were at Nuremberg. I hopped a bus, went to that town and found them. But when I showed them what I wanted, and with my scant German pointed to a wheel, they said “Nein,” and one handed me a broom. My dad had taught me to work for what I wanted so I ignored the racist gesture and swept that floor every Saturday for a few weekends until one of the guys sat me down at the wheel and showed me a few basics. I was hooked.

When I went back to Pennsylvania, where I had worked in a coal mine before going into the Army, I resumed work there in the mines. I took a whole pay check one Friday and bought myself a wheel and a thousand pounds of clay. Then I got to work. All I could produce were odd objects that looked like weapons or doorstops. I took a few pottery classes, then, a breakthrough—a workshop with the potter David Robinson in Weare, New Hampshire. I signed up for one week and stayed for two. His teachings were the foundation of all I have done since. But in the ensuing thirty-five years or more, I had the privilege of learning from and working with many of the best— Jack Troy, Kevin Crowe, David Hovland, David Shaner, and Charles Counts.

Within a year or so after I learned the wheel fairly well, I decided to make one of those face jugs I’d heard about so many years before when I was at a family funeral. If my four-times Great Aunt Evangeline made them, maybe I should make them, too. I’ve never stopped, but the face jugs have evolved over the years, taking on the characteristics of nearly everything I’ve seen, heard, felt, and am feeling now—the anger, the injustices, the inequities, the feeling that Black lives did not matter. But also the achievements, inventions, courageous acts of so many, all forms of resistance to the system. I’ve honored Maya Angelou, Demond Tutu, Harriet Tubman, Fannie Lou Hammer, John Lewis, and many others.

I want to believe that times are changing, that the Black Lives Matter movement will be the new Civil Rights Era, when my dad sat by the door of our house in Washington D.C. during the riots with a gun to protect us. But out of that came change. I have mostly been the Black Potter in a white world that supported me but lived also in the Black world where I saw tragedy, living while Black. I’m the fulcrum, obliged to balance it all. I’m still plumbing the depths of my artistic vision. I feel freer than ever to tell the story of my people with clay and my bare hands. And I’ll keep on doing it.” – Jim McDowell

For more information about Jim, head to www.blackpotter.com