“It started out as young scholarly curiosity,” the artist Theaster Gates said of his initial interest in the work of the 19th-century enslaved potter David Drake, also known as Dave the Potter. Gates was an undergraduate at Iowa State University in the early ’90s, making ceramics that he said referenced “white Americana craft” from the ’60s, like Peter Voulkos and Rudy Autio. While he admired that work, Gates recalled talking to his professor, Ingrid Lilligren, about the lineage in which he was working, asking, “Are the only named people we know all white guys?” He felt that “there was no precedent for the kind of craft I’m interested in making.” But Lilligren pointed him to the school library which held a small catalog discussing Dave the Potter, whose work was just beginning to be recognized more widely.

“Dave was a kind of archetype of a Black poet-potter, as a way of developing an apparatus for believing more in myself. I believed more in Dave first: look at him, then look at me,” he said, adding that it got him to asking of himself, “Is it possible for me to announce Dave as a way of justifying my own Black craftsmanship?” And thus began Gates’s decades-long engagement with Drake’s work, which has included a 2010 exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum that included a book of hymns responding to the poems David had incised into several of his vessels. That culminated, in a way, with Gates acquiring a Drake work in 2021.

“By 2021, Dave was explicitly on my mind,” he said, noting that he thought to himself, “I think I’m ready. I think I want to invest in this.” He saw it as “a way of honoring all of the ways that Dave had given meaning to my practice—let me go and get some Dave up in the studio.” Now, Gates has decided to gift his Drake vessel to the artist’s descendants, who have made headlines recently for their pursuit of the “ethical restitution” of Drake’s art to the family, including securing an ownership transfer of two of Drake pots owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, last October. To mark the occasion, Gates has made the ownership transfer, the Drake vessel, and his own art about Drake the focus of an exhibition at Gagosian’s Park & 75 space in the Upper East Side (through May 2).

He characterized the show as a way of “making an offering to Dave.” Installation view of Theaster Gates’s 2026 solo show, “Dave: All My Relations,” at Gagosian Park & 75, New York. Photo Maris Hutchinson/©Theaster Gates/Courtesy Gagosian and the Dave Potter Legacy Trust LLC Drake’s status within the mainstream art world has drastically changed over the past decade, recognized for its aesthetic and historical value, especially given that as an enslaved Black man it would have been illegal for Drake—who lived in Edgefield, South Carolina, and took his enslaver’s surname after emancipation—to be literate.

That he was able to not only sign his name to his work, which legally belonged to his enslaver, but also write moving poems for them is a testament to Drake’s prowess as both artist and poet. The most high-profile showing of Drake’s art came via “Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina,” which debuted in 2022 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before traveling to Boston, Atlanta, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. The past decade has also seen Drake’s descendants, who learned of their ancestor only 10 years ago, seeking to reclaim the ownership of their ancestor’s art, which began in earnest after the opening of “Hear Me Now.” “We want to bring all the pots that Dave put out home,” Yaba Baker, one of Drake’s descendants, told ARTnews in an interview.

“We don’t want it to be a zero-sum game.” Instead, the family is looking at each individual case to plot out what works best for both sides in order to “make it more of an ethical ownership.” The family still wants museums to have Drake’s work on view, Baker said, “because his story is an amazing story that everybody can draw from.” Installation view of Theaster Gates’s 2026 solo show, “Dave: All My Relations,” at Gagosian Park & 75, New York. Photo Maris Hutchinson/©Theaster Gates/Courtesy Gagosian and the Dave Potter Legacy Trust LLC Though at least 60 institutions, and countless private collectors, own Drake’s 200-some surviving works, so far the MFA Boston, which co-organized the traveling exhibition, has been the only one to publicly announce such a restitution.

In its wall label, the MFA Boston characterized the provenance and ownership of Drake’s art as “broken” given that it was “conceptualized and created under duress,” referring to his years of enslavement. Baker recalled first meeting Gates at the Michigan stop of “Hear Me Now” a few years back and being struck by “his commitment to Dave.” Then a few months back, George Fatheree, the attorney representing the family in its restitution pursuits, suggested contacting Gates about an ownership transfer of the work he owned. Gates recalled receiving a letter last fall from Fatheree, who fr