Face Vessel
date: label: date made
content: 1960s
label: Date made
content: Mid-20th century
name: label: maker
content: Brown Pottery
notes: label: Description
content: The tradition of shaping human likenesses on ceramic vessels is thousands of years old. Face vessels held different meanings in different cultures around the world. Some were probably used in burial rituals, others satirized the person whose features were captured in clay, and still others were made just for fun.
label: Description
content: The earliest face vessels known to have been produced by white southern potters were probably not made until the end of the 1800s. White potters working in the Edgefield area in the mid-1800s may have seen vessels made by African American potters who were enslaved, and taken the idea with them as they moved out of South Carolina.
label: Description
content: Like many southern pottery families, the Brown family encompasses a line of potters generations long. The Browns began making pottery in west-central Georgia by the mid-1800s before migrating east to the Atlanta area after the Civil War. The family spread from there to North and South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas. This face vessel, on the right, was made by one of many Brown family potters working in Georgia in the 1960s.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
place: label: place made
content: United States: Georgia, Fulton county
label: place made
content: United States: North Carolina, Arden
setName: label: See more items in
content: Home and Community Life: Ceramics and Glass
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content: Face Vessels
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content: Cultures & Communities
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content: Domestic Furnishings
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: CE.74.22
label: accession number
content: 313386
label: catalog number
content: 74.0022
objectType: label: Object Name
content: vessel, face
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: ceramic, stoneware (overall material)
label: Physical Description
content: ceramic, stoneware, coarse (overall material)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 8 1/2 in x 5 7/16 in; 21.59 cm x 13.81125 cm