Sugar bowl 1873 - 1876

This porcelain sugar bowl was made by Karl L. H. Müller, a German artist, at an unknown date. It’s important to consider objects like this within their historical context, to understand the story it tells. The sugar bowl is decorated with floral motifs and features a Black man’s head as the handle on the lid. This imagery, popular in European decorative arts, reflects the troubling history of colonialism and the sugar trade, which relied on enslaved labor. The dehumanizing representation reduces a person to a mere object, a symbol of the era’s power dynamics and racial prejudices. Such objects played a role in shaping and perpetuating harmful stereotypes. Reflecting on this piece today allows us to confront the legacy of these representations and their impact on contemporary dialogues about race, identity, and representation.