At the center of “Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina,” a revelatory exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, stands a majestic artifact: a stoneware storage jar that may qualify as one of 19th-century America’s great sculptures. It measures over two feet high, with a slightly rippling surface layered with drips of glaze in contrasting earth tones, from deep umber to ocher.

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The jar, from the collection of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., was created by a man now called David Drake, but who was known for decades only as Dave the Potter or Dave. A gifted enslaved artisan, Dave was admired during his lifetime for his skill and strength. He worked big, and his largest jars, like this one, started on the potter’s wheel but had to be completed by hand, using the coil method. When he signed and dated this particular jar, in 1858, he was working in the Stony Bluff Manufactory in the Old Edgefield district of South Carolina, where the ground was rich in stoneware clays. Sometime after the Emancipation Proclamation, he relocated to Texas, where he worked in potteries formed by other freedmen from Edgefield. He died in the 1870s.