Jim McDowell has been a ceramic artist making face jugs for over thirty-five years, drawing upon his African American and Caribbean ancestry. He presents a talk titled, "African American Face Jugs: Thoughts Become Art Inspired by the Ancestors."
In this artist lecture at Krannert Art Museum, McDowell discusses the history and practice of his pottery, especially 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.
