Texas Clay: 19th-Century Stoneware Pottery from the Bayou Bend Collection by Amy Kurlander (review)

This exhibition monograph exemplifies the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s commendable commitment to advancing the awareness and research of nineteenth-century Texas material culture, particularly through its Bayou Bend stoneware collection. A shared historical perspective, narrative style, and content connect the three essays, each introducing the reader to “the history of Texas pottery as it developed in different regions from the 1850s through the 1880s” (p. ix). Half- and full-page glossy photographs enhance the text and wonderfully illustrate vessels in the Bayou Bend collection attributable to specific potteries. Similarly, the small photographs and descriptions of waster shards exemplify the usefulness of such shards to ground truth and correlate historical and archaeological data with vessels in the Bayou Bend and other collections. A summary catalog at the end provides a thumbnail photograph and a brief attribution for the 182 Texas-made vessels composing the collection.

The three essays focus on potters who significantly contributed to the stoneware-making areas and traditions that uniquely coalesced to define nineteenth-century Texas stoneware pottery. In her essay, “An Introduction to Stoneware Pottery in 19th-Century Texas,” exhibit curator and project fellow Amy Kurlander describes the cultural origins of the two primary stoneware traditions brought by potters to Texas: the groundhog kiln and alkaline glazes associated with Edgefield District, South Carolina, and the beehive kiln and salt glazes common to northern and midwestern states, North Carolina, and Germany. Kurlander describes and illustrates the geographic distribution of the major clay outcrops and the counties in which stoneware potteries were established, and she effectively chronicles the history and contributions of several significant Texas stoneware potteries and potters.

In “The Shaping of Texas Pottery: Shards along the ‘Thousand-Mile Journey’ from the Carolinas to Texas,” Joey Brackner, director of the Alabama Center for Traditional Culture, Alabama State Council on the Arts, explores the genealogical connections of southern potters prior to their arrival in Texas, specifically to each other and to the Edgefield District. He emphasizes the spatial and temporal history of the pottery-making communities that settled along southern routes of westward expansion and summarizes their contributions in shaping Texas’s stoneware traditions.

The third essay, “The Wilson Potters: An African-American Enterprise in 19th-Century Texas,” is reprinted from a 2002 publication of the same name authored by Michael K. Brown, former curator at the Bayou Bend collection. Brown attributes the “aesthetics and innovations” of Texas stoneware to potters who migrated primarily from the Edgefield District and established potteries along the Wilcox clay formation (p. 49). He identifies potters who owned and employed slaves, and he examines the contributions of specific slave potters, particularly the Wilson Potters, who were trained in southern alkaline glazing. Brown argues that due to the influence of a potter from Ohio trained in salt glazing, the Wilson Potters produced salt-glazed rather than alkaline-glazed vessels at the pottery they established after emancipation.

Finally, this exhibition monograph provides valuable references to resource materials, including archaeological literature and several archaeological collections of waster shards available for further comparative studies of Texas’s stoneware pottery traditions.