Over more than half a century, the odd little stoneware jug inlaid with white porcelain eyes and fiercely bared teeth was stored in a china closet, then a shoe box, an attic and a kitchen cupboard.

In his face jugs, McDowell also honors Dave Drake, an enslaved person from Edgefield who made pottery in the mid-1800s. Though Drake was not known to make face jugs, he was extremely skilled and ...

Jim McDowell, who calls himself ‘the Black Potter’ – and features in the Wallpaper* USA 300 – has spent much of his 35-year-long career making face jugs, a form introduced by enslaved people of ...

• While no one knows exactly why face jugs were made, historians surmise they were a synthesis of several religious beliefs from regions that Africans passed through along the Middle Passage ...

Q: Recently my wife’s mother gave us this jug. She received it from an aunt some 70 years ago. The aunt got the jug from a black man who was working on a “poor farm” in Massachusetts in the ...

The Meaders family pottery has made face jugs since it opened in 1893, using locally dug clays, foot-powered wheels, and homemade glazes. Quillan Lanier Meaders never understood the huge popularity of ...

Picture your face. Now picture your face as a handmade ceramic jug for housing beer, whiskey or moonshine. And now relish in the fact that we found a way to make it happen. Yes, it involves Montana.

Just a few decades ago, face jugs were thought of as a charming folk art made by white potters in Georgia and North Carolina during the 20th century. Then it turned out that slaves had been making ...

Bloomfield Village residents George and Kay White Meyer are well known and respected in the realm of American Folk Art. His collections of canes and walking sticks and face jugs have been ...

A clay jug made in the shape of a face is exposing secrets of the slave trade and of African-American migration patterns. The jug found in Germantown, is attracting national attention. A production ...

Jim McDowell holds his jug, “Emmett Till.” (Photo By Rimas Zailskas, courtesy of Asheville Made Magazine) This article was originally published on February 1, 2021, in Folklife Magazine.