Abstract:
In his artist’s lecture, Jim McDowell will discuss his face jugs. They represent, in part, the
lives of enslaved people abducted from Africa, and their descendants who lived through slavery, the
Civil War, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow South, the Great Migration, the Civil Rights era on into
today's Black Lives Matter movement.
Bio:
Jim McDowell has been making face jugs for over thirty-five years, drawing upon his African American
and Caribbean ancestry. McDowell’s four-times great aunt Evangeline was an enslaved potter in
Jamaica who made face jugs. At a family funeral, his grandfather said that enslaved people were
never given gravestones, so face jugs sometimes served as grave markers. The forms and style of
McDowell’s face jugs have evolved over the years, taking on the characteristics of things he has
seen, heard, felt, and is 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.”
