The Commeraw Project was a completely organic creation, born out of a chance research encounter. My name is Brandt Zipp and I am its founder and director. I grew up being dragged against my will to antiques show after antiques show when I would have rather been trading baseball cards or playing Nintendo games. Sometimes doing something you don’t want to do is the best thing you can be doing.
The antiques business my parents ran through the better part of the 1980’s and all the way through the 90’s specialized in a very specific type of American antique: salt-glazed stoneware. Salt-glazed stoneware was born in Germany in the 14th or 15th century but it became a vital part of the American economy as the nation came out of the Revolution. Used primarily for long-term food and beverage storage, its high durability and safe glaze made it perfect for meeting an important everyday need of Americans from the most affluent to the most impoverished.
After graduating from Johns Hopkins University in 1999, I was torn between continuing my studies as an award-winning writer from a prestigious program and diving hard into something I was becoming more and more passionate about: those old crocks and jugs my parents made me lug from antiques show to antiques show. In particular I really enjoyed the direction my parents’ business had taken and was optimistic about where it was headed. It wasn’t too long after graduation that I convinced them that they needed one of those relatively new-fangled things all serious businesses needed: a website.
There was no website at the time specifically dedicated to buying and selling old American stoneware, and the website I built and we ran as a family quickly became very successful. Within a few years, the business grew further into a premier auction house dedicated to selling the best the stoneware craft had to offer, and the rest is history: That business, now called Crocker Farm, has become a household name in the industry and has achieved all sorts of world auction records along the way. But through all of that, the thing that really excites me about stoneware is not so much the selling side of things, it’s the research that goes into these old pots.
The research we undertake at Crocker Farm has been responsible for completely transforming the landscape of our understanding of the American stoneware craft, with new discoveries made on a regular basis as we interpret the pottery we handle. Some of these have brought entire new bodies of work to light, or given important but forgotten potters their very identities back. This is what happened to Thomas Commeraw.
I’m sure it would go without saying that my serendipitous discovery of Thomas Commeraw’s identity was the single greatest moment of my research career. I say “serendipitous” because it came completely out of the blue in 2003, while I was trying to research an important Baltimore stoneware potter who had been born and trained in Manhattan. While combing through the 1800 and 1810 federal censuses–relatively simply documents whose purpose was to enumerate every single American household of the time–I found the name of a potter who had long been assumed to be yet another New York City stoneware potter of white European descent, “Thomas Commeraw,” with a simple notation attached to his name: “a Black.” Little did I know that I would spend the next two decades researching this man and writing his biography, Commeraw’s Stoneware, published in 2022. My research also inspired the wonderful Commeraw exhibition, Crafting Freedom, which opened in early 2023 at the New-York Historical Society then traveled to the Fenimore Art Museum.
So with Commeraw’s story finally told, why do I continue to actively research African-American potters? As I said, this happened very organically and was not something I set out to do. Intensive research projects into the lives of African-American craftsmen were certainly not en vogue in the early years of this century. The current wave of extreme interest in this specific field is a beautiful thing to see, but imagine me trying to explain the importance of Thomas W. Commeraw from that vantage point in 2010, which is when I first announced his identity to the modern world.
Way back in 1943, Howard University art historian James A. Porter’s Modern Negro Art laid out the problem that faced African-American craftsmen in receiving their proper recognition and scholarship, at a time when the histories of their white counterparts were being enthusiastically written: “[About 1933 I] began the activity of locating and collecting the facts and documents that form the bulk of this volume. At that time very little was known and scarcely anything had been written about the Negro artisans and artists whose lives ante-dated the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century. But the constantly reiterated statement that ‘The American Negro has no pictorial or plastic art’–a statement for which both white and Negro persons were responsible–acted as a spur to my researches.” The fact that Thomas Commeraw continued to languish in obscurity in the early years of the 21st century underscores just how deep-seated the problem Porter highlighted was.
I feel that if I didn’t continue this research, I would be letting a unique but potentially very powerful skillset go to waste. Having gone through all of the trials and tribulations of researching an early African-American figure over a twenty-year period, I am now an expert on how to do that, what resources are available, what pitfalls I know I may encounter. From the ceramics side of things, my knowledge of how to research period American potters is as advanced as such a thing could be. (By the way, here’s a recent interview I gave that might be illuminating.)
In other words, I want to use something I’m really good at to do something I think is very good to do. It invigorates me personally when I find something new about any American potter from any walk of life who has had his or her history swept under the rug. But I also think it behooves us as human beings to use our God-given skills to better others, even those people who have been dead for two hundred years. Perhaps more importantly, telling these stories enriches the lives of people currently walking the Earth, and that’s a really good thing. These old potters have much to tell us and I want to help give them their identities back.
Brandt Zipp, May 2025