Visual Arts

American Folk Art Celebrates Face Jugs

Vincent. Stacy Lambert, artist

American Folk Art & Framing will hold its 6th annual Face Jug Show from Thursday, April 5, through Thursday, April 19, featuring the work of ten potters. An opening reception will be held Friday, April 6, from 5–8 p.m., coinciding with downtown’s First Friday Art Walk.

Gallery owner Betsey-Rose Weiss says that the potters represented in the show are known and respected among international collectors. “These are really remarkable potters,” she says, “some of them legacy potters.” The soil of the regions represented by the potters is especially good for pottery, she adds. Regionally, Weiss says, there are 80 to 100 potters making face jugs, which have become highly collectible.

NC potters in the show hail from Buncombe County up to Yancey County, where there are some nontraditional potters, and over to Seagrove in Randolph County. Represented also are potters from South Carolina and the Georgia mountains.

“The southern face jug originated in Edgefield, SC,” says potter Kim Ellington who works in the Catawba Valley region of WNC. “They were made by slaves working at numerous potteries during the early 19th century before the Civil War.”

Ellington began making face jugs in the early 1990s when he first began learning about the local tradition. “The sculptural aspects of the face jug are what appeal to me,” he says. “I like to make each one slightly different in some way, either through decoration or expression.” He makes very few face jugs, however, he says, not wanting to get caught in a “repetitious rut” with them.

Ellington follows the traditions of the region in digging his own local clay, decorating using an alkaline glaze and firing with a wood-fired ground hog kiln.

Jugs in the Catawba Valley region are generally in the two-quart to one-gallon size range, Ellington says, although at least one potter creates large jugs of five-gallon size. Another Catawba Valley potter in the show, Walter Fleming is in his 80s, making him the oldest working potter in the region.

The show will highlight some traditional materials, including glass, which, when placed in the kiln, melts into the pot, a process going back to the mid-1800s. Traditional potters also used broken river rocks or porcelain as teeth for the faces.

Southern face pottery was often used to hold moonshine, a theory being that the grotesque features would scare children away from the contents. African-Americans, says Weiss, used face jugs as headstones after death. If, a year later, the jug was still intact on a grave, it indicated that it had been used as a portal for the passage of the soul. A broken jug, however, meant that the soul had wrestled with the devil.

American Folk Art and Framing is located at 64 Biltmore Avenue in Asheville. Hours are Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. For more information, visit amerifolk.com or call 828.281.2134.

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