Southport Magazine

Ugly Faces Anyone?
Artists workshop creates unique sculptures
Story & photos by Carla Edstrom
On April 13th through the 15th, 2018 several local potters, including myself, embarked on a fun and somewhat scary voyage into the abysses of our souls to find what is angry and important and put it into our art. The Dreams and Journeys workshop at the Southport campus of Brunswick Community College on Lord Street took us there with potter Jim McDowell, aka The Black Potter, as our teacher and guide. A North Carolina artist who resides near Asheville, McDowell has gained critical acclaim for his spirit “ugly” face jugs that depict his African heritage as a descendent of slaves. His spirit jugs can be found all over the country including galleries in New York City. Being extremely interested in pottery folk art history of the south, I was excited to be a part of this workshop.

As artists, we go to workshops to learn something different and fresh, and then hopefully put some part of what we learned into our art. Being a potter who enjoys making ugly face jugs already, I was looking for something to stretch my creativity a bit and to give extra meaning to my work. It turns out that this workshop was more than that to me. With this being such a heavy topic, I was pleasantly surprised at how positive and fun it was. McDowell often started singing gospel songs and spirituals while we worked which was really refreshing. He explained about how he goes about making a jug and going into the dark abyss inside himself. “I make face jugs that reflect the anger that I feel. I have to channel the anger in my life. I invite the ancestors to come and attend us, because we are going to step into some areas that maybe people don’t want to go into,” explained McDowell. “But I stay in these areas because I want to remember. You must allow the jug to speak to you.”
McDowell’s interest in face jugs started years before as a young boy while attending a funeral of a loved one. “I found myself intrigued by a conversation between my father and some elder family members. They were talking about something called face jugs and how they related to our family history,” he explained. “This is the African-American face-jug oral history as it was passed down in my family, the McDowell-Poston family. My father, James T. McDowell, Sr., told me the story as he received it from his father, Boyce McDowell, who was a tombstone maker in Gaffney, South Carolina, and he got it from his father, my great-grandfather who lived during slavery times.”
“Slaves were not allowed to have tombstones, so sometimes pottery or even a face jug served as their grave markers,” said McDowell. Not unlike many artists throughout history, his work is often a political statement. Such is the case of his two-sided face jug of Emmitt Till, whose story is well known in the South. Till was a 14-year-old African-American boy from the South Side of Chicago who was visiting Mississippi in 1955. After he was accused of whistling at a white woman on the street, he was beaten, shot, and thrown into a river. One side of the jug is the beautiful boy before he was beaten and the other is the depiction of the horrible beating, mutilation and death this boy suffered. The story is depicted through McDowell in the art of the face jug. This ugly part of our history as a country should be seen and remembered so we never go back to that again.
The history of face jugs goes back generations in the South. “With this workshop, we wanted to have a great time, acquire new skill in our craft, and come away with fresh personal insights in the process”, said Barbara McFall, Director of the Brunswick Community College Southport Center Campus. “We chose the African-American Spirit Jug as the vehicle for our journey. In African-American oral history, “ugly” face jugs in the Americas derived from African ritual figures believed to store spiritual energy used to aid or harm. As the tradition evolved, enslaved people in NC, SC and GA crafted spirit jugs to place along with personal items on their loved ones’ graves. First noted among enslaved potters in Edgefield, SC in the mid-1800’s, these jugs are considered among the first truly American craft pieces. The genre celebrates a timeless theme of self-identification.”
McDowell taught me to look inside my soul, and see how I got where I am today. And he also taught us how to take the bad from our lives and put it in clay as a way to acknowledge it and release it. He had us write a phrase on our jugs to describe what we found in our abyss. Some participants expressed how drugs have affected their life or physical abuses or going through difficult marriages. I ended up smashing down the last one I made so it looked like it flopped. I named it Knocked the Wind out of Me. For me it represents how careless the words of others have hurt me in my life and knocked me down. I found this to be very therapeutic and can’t wait to start creating using his methods soon.
McFall could not have been happier with the outcome of the workshop. “Dreams and Journeys Workshop sought to explore current cultural truths through the prism of historical art forms,” she said. “More specifically, a variety of cultural frictions in the news had raised the question of how the dreams and journeys of Brunswick County’s early settlers shaped the perceptions that define our area today, and how those perceptions continue to be expressed in our daily lives and shared through our arts, crafts and culture.”
The North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural & Cultural Resources, supported the workshop. One requirement of projects funded through the Grassroots Grant program is that minority populations receive full consideration. BCC Southport Center hopes to hold many more workshops like this in the future. Artists rely on workshops such as this to refresh their art, learn something new and work closely with other artists. Having workshops available in our home studio so we don’t have to travel is a valuable tool to our growth and success. “Jim McDowell was upbeat, energetic, passionate about his topic and very good at his craft. We were not disappointed,” said McFall. We hope to have him back at the Southport campus soon!
To contact McDowell, read more about his life and see his face jugs, go to his website www.Blackpotter.com. Please join us at Brunswick Community College for Fall classes! Registration will be starting soon! The regular 16-week schedule, resumes the week of August 15. Look for the Choices catalogue around July 4th for a schedule or check online at http://www.brunswickcc.edu/southport-center/