What you are looking at is the afterlife of memories.
Memory jugs were funerary objects found in the South on the graves of African Americans through the mid‑20th century. These small stoneware vessels were adorned with fragments broken china, glass shards and items beloved by the departed. The ritual is said to have its origins in Central Africa’s Bakongo culture. It was brought here by enslaved people and continued by their descendants, mainly sharecroppers.
The artist Terry Adkins (1953–2014) had seen one such vessel in his grandmother’s home, in Upperville, Virginia, as a young boy, which fueled his fascination. He collected hundreds of memory jugs from the mid-1990s until his death, and began taking X‑rays of them while he was a professor of fine arts at the University of Pennsylvania. This quartet of images is featured in a forthcoming exhibition at New York’s New Museum, titled “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” a show conceived by the late c
The Artifacts of Bygone Lives Syreeta McFadden
Photographs by Terry Adkins
What you are looking at is the afterlife of memories.
Memory jugs were funerary objects found in the South on the graves of African Americans through the mid‑20th century. These small stoneware vessels were adorned with fragments broken china, glass shards and items beloved by the departed. The ritual is said to have its origins in Central Africa’s Bakongo culture. It was brought here by enslaved people and continued by their descendants, mainly sharecroppers.
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The artist Terry Adkins (1953–2014) had seen one such vessel in his grandmother’s home, in Upperville, Virginia, as a young boy, which fueled his fascination. He collected hundreds of memory jugs from the mid-1990s until his death, and began taking X‑rays of them while he was a professor of fine arts at the University of Penn