“Who Are the Other Potters? What Are Their Names?”

This chapter focuses on Theaster Gates’s 2010 exhibition To Speculate Darkly, which puts Gates’s multimedia work in dialogue with Drake. Jarenski’s chapter engages with the theme of erasure in Gates’s aesthetic and examines the ways that Gates imagined himself as Dave “the Slave” Potter, using Dave’s hyperbolic vessels as the staging area for his own artistic performance. Gates’s work with Dave resonates with the work of other artists, like Kara Walker (inspired by the panorama, the silhouette, and sentimental fiction) and Carrie Mae Weems, who has incorporated ethnographic daguerreotypes into her work. In order for us to fully appreciate the still undertheorized experimental breakthroughs of antebellum black artists, slave and free, this chapter claims that we must recognize the continued influence of nineteenth-century forms on contemporary African American art.