The Dave Project: Exploring African-American Material Culture
For more than a decade the Chipstone Foundation has pursued topics related to African-American material culture, a topic often left out of American art museum exhibitions and decorative arts galleries. Many of the African-American artisans who created items in museum collections are anonymous.  The Dave Project: Exploring African-American Material Culture reflects this institutional commitment. The title refers to the Foundation’s ongoing work on David Drake, an enslaved potter who inscribed his monumental jars with couplets.  Research and exhibitions on Dave the Potter, Thomas Day, John Hemings, the enslaved makers of Southern face vessels, and other African-American artists and craftspeople reveal compelling American stories that belong in museums, schools, and in art historical and historical scholarship. The Chipstone Foundation studies and shares the objects they created, from face jugs to fine furniture, to tell their stories.