Justice

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. "

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Storage Jar, David Drake

Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Context:

This storage jar is a masterwork by the enslaved African American potter and poet David Drake. This vessel is inscribed with his signature, the date, and a poem of Drake’s own creation, a practice anomalous in the production of nineteenth-century stoneware in this country, and one he reserved for a very small percentage of his output. The object boldly states its own function in the inscription: "when you fill this Jar with pork or beef / Scot will be there; to get a peace." Not only is Drake referencing the jar’s intended contents, but his creative word choice and declaration of authorship is manifest. Drake’s poetry speaks to the trauma of slavery, but also signals the agency and power of a gifted artisan in the plantation economy. (The Met)

Your turn:

How can art be an act of defying injustice?
How can the act of creating art be a form of personal protest against the injustices you witness in the world?

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