 – Its debut was in cradle of the Indigenous Southwest in the summer 2022, “Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery” at the Museum…){kind=link}
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO (PNAN) – Its debut was in cradle of the Indigenous Southwest in the summer 2022, “Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery” at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture. This rare and first-ever Indian Arts Research Center of the School for Advanced Research (SAR) exhibition celebrates the 100th anniversary of the creation of its pottery collection in 1922. The showing also marks the institution’s 13-year efforts to bridge the cultural needs and knowledge of Native communities with its public education mission.
Unlike exhibitions guided by Eurocentric timelines and Western concepts of art and history, the exhibit’s focus on personal and community meaning, emerges as a conversation expressed in prose, poetry and the visual language of pottery.
In Grounded in Clay, it features over 100 historic and contemporary works in clay that gives authority and voice to the Pueblo Pottery Collective, a group of over 60 individual members of 21 tribal communities who selected and wrote about artistically or culturally distinctive pots from two significant Pueblo pottery collections: the Indian Arts Research Center of the School for Advanced Research (SAR) in Santa Fe and the Vilcek Foundation of New York.
The curators’ firsthand knowledge of pots and potters, family rituals, traditional materials and daily use, grounds viewers in a powerful sense of people and place. At the same time, a thread of ancestral memory connects individual pots to the pride, pain and living legacy of Pueblo peoples. For an example:
Museum curator Tony Chavarria writes of a ca. 1900 stone-polished blackware olla from his home pueblo of Kha’p’o Owingeh/Santa Clara whose shape sparks a memory of his grandmother’s favorite vintage dress: “I see the flared collar and high neck in this jar. I see my grandma in the beauty from the earth.”
For more in-depth details on this show, see: www.museumfoundation.org/museums/museum-of-indian-arts-and-culture and a Grounded in Clay preview at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKtj3YjhNfw&t=3s