MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Who made the chairs, the quilts, the horseshoes and iron fences? At the close of the Civil War, those skilled artisans in the South were most likely to be Black. In fact, Black skilled artisans outnumbered white artisans 5 to 1 at that time. Learning this from an essay sent our next guest, himself an artisan, on a quest to find out more about Black craft in America. He's told us some of what he's found in a new book titled "A Short History Of Black Craft." It's organized by essays and Illustrations profiling 10 Black craftspeople and the objects they left behind. And Robell Awake is with us now to tell us more about it. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us.
ROBELL AWAKE: Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.
MARTIN: It's so interesting to kind of see the book because some of these pieces are things that we see around us all the time. I mean, they're very much copied. And we really don't even think about who perhaps invented these styles or who made these styles popular.
AWAKE: Yeah. Yeah. So being from Atlanta, working construction was a very diverse place. You know, there were lots of Black folks, Hispanic, white. And then as I got more into furniture-making, it was a lot less diverse. And it was really discouraging to not see myself represented, and I wanted to learn about the Black people that made furniture. And reading about how outsized the impact of Black skilled labor was really revelatory for me.
MARTIN: How did you get into chairmaking?
AWAKE: I got into chairmaking just kind of, you know - I'm self-taught, you know? I didn't go to a furniture school. The only real formal training I got was a two-week workshop at the North Bennet Street School in Boston, which is a craft school.
MARTIN: Well, your chairs seem to me kind of like art pieces. Can you sit on them?
AWAKE: Yeah, absolutely. You can absolutely sit on them. I use primarily hand tools for everything. I start from a log on the ground, and I split out the part. And kind of a lot of what's different about my chairs is the back slats, what your back kind of hits and rests on, I carve abstract sort of carvings on them. And that's referencing a different chairmaking tradition from Ethiopia, where my parents emigrated from in, like, the early '70s. It just kind of felt right to combine those two design traditions and come up with something new.
MARTIN: So tell me about the chairs of Richard Poynor.
AWAKE: Richard Poynor was an enslaved chairmaker from central Tennessee. And he really pioneered a style of chair, of what we think of as a modern ladderback chair. So...
MARTIN: I have some (laughter).
AWAKE: Yeah. You have some? Oh, great. Yeah. So, you know, he was really an innovator. And his family - they were three generations of chairmakers - were making or repairing chairs in Williamson County, Tennessee, up until the 1940s. And making chairs is kind of its own niche thing that I was getting into because it's more hand tool work than using heavy machinery and making things that are - I don't know - not as vibrant.
MARTIN: Do you have a favorite of the people or the objects that you profiled?
AWAKE: I don't have a favorite, but I think one of the stories that resonates with me the most is Harriet Powers. She was a farmer and a quiltmaker outside of Athens, Georgia. And she just had a style that was all her own, particularly her one quilt that I profile in the book, which was completed around 1898. And the central square of this one quilt depicted the Leonid meteor shower of 1833, which was very significant to enslaved folks in this time period - kind of a sign, like maybe this was Judgment Day. Maybe this was an end to enslavement. It even was the, you know, reason that the song "Stars Fell On Alabama" was written by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. You know, and just learning the significance of this event through her quilt struck me that, like, I'm learning about history and about Black life through this object, through Harriet Powers. It's still teaching people to this day.
MARTIN: You focus particularly on Black craftspeople in the South. But you do profile a person whose work I think many people will have seen, which is Ann Lowe. And Ann Lowe created Jackie Kennedy's wedding dress to then-Senator John F. Kennedy, and she didn't really get credit for this for quite some time.
AWAKE: Yeah, so Ann Lowe is such a remarkable story. So she was a third-generation seamstress from Alabama. Eventually, she ended up going to fashion school in New York and encountered a lot of racism there, was made to take classes, you know, in a separate room. But it was clear to everybody that she was just the most gifted dressmaker there was. And she was the first Black person to own a couture dress shop on Madison Avenue. This was mid-century. And that snub by Jacqueline Kennedy really hurt her career because it could've done wonders. And, you know, this dress is still cited and referenced in best of kind of wedding day looks of all time, but her name is usually left out of those pieces.
There were so many Black makers throughout history. I mean, Abraham Lincoln's wife, Mary Todd, all her dresses were made by an incredible Black seamstress. Dressmaking in America was such a field that was really dominated by Black women that it was just the tendency to not acknowledge their work.
MARTIN: Before we let you go, what do you think you learned from assembling this book? On the one hand, there are stories of just remarkable innovation. On the other hand, there are some really sad stories. When you look at this altogether, what do you see?
AWAKE: I think I see just the nuance of Black experience. You know, there were people who were able to use craft in antebellum times to gain more freedom in their life, as much as one could in this time period. You know, since 2020, there's been kind of a broadening of consciousness of the extent to which enslaved labor built the foundations of not just America but the Western world. And I think what's left out a lot of times in that conversation is how the ingenuity and skill and technology that Black people pioneered was just as foundational. I think what I'm trying to do with the book is translate that, as a craftsperson myself, as someone who can kind of read the language of craft and kind of decipher these stories.
MARTIN: Robell Awake is the author of "A Short History Of Black Craft In Ten Objects." And he has a solo show of his own chairs coming up in April in Chicago. Robell Awake, thank you so much for joining us.
AWAKE: Thank you so much for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STARS FELL ON ALABAMA")
ELLA FITZGERALD: (Singing) And stars fell on Alabama. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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