CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/4/2026

Power and Resistance in 'Art in the Americas'

For this holiday weekend, we can think of no better book to feature than MFA Publications’ Art in the Americas: Conflict, Culture, and Exchange in the Eighteenth Century, contrasting works from the collection of MFA Boston in order to disrupt concepts of old world versus new, colonizer versus colonized, tradition versus innovation. Pictured here, a storage jar by David Drake, 1857. Co-editor Ethan W. Lasser writes: “In 1857, far from Boston, on a plantation in Edgefield, South Carolina, the enslaved potter Dave (who later took the name David Drake) etched a short poem into the shoulder of a stoneware storage jar. Dave worked under particularly precarious conditions. In South Carolina on the eve of the Civil War, it was illegal for enslaved people to read and write. Yet, like [Paul] Revere, Dave inscribed his name and the date alongside a strongly worded inscription that spoke truth to power: “I made this Jar = for cash / Though its called Lucre trash.” With these lines, Dave announced his role as maker and challenged those that undervalued his labor.”