Claudia Mitchell, a renowned potter from Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, embarks on a clay-gathering mission on a mesa nestled between two beautiful sandstone rock formations. Armed with a hammer and pick, she expresses her gratitude to the Clay Mother – Mother Earth, in prayers and offerings. These offerings include a sprinkling of cornmeal, a small piece of turquoise, and the precious gift of water – a vital resource in the high desert. Mitchell also pays homage to the women who preceded her, especially her grandmother Lucy M. Lewis, an esteemed potter who continued to create masterpieces well into her 80s. Despite years of working with clay, her grandmother’s hands remained resilient and firm.
In her own artistic process, 59-year-old Mitchell incorporates fragments of pottery from past generations that she discovers along the roadside. She grinds these shards into powder and adds them to her clay mix to enhance the strength of her pots before firing them. Through her vessels, Mitchell believes that “the spirit of all those people is brought back to life,” bridging the gap between the past and the present, and defining the future of pottery.
Now, Mitchell has the opportunity to redefine the perception of American art. She is one of the 68 Pueblo potters, artists, and cultural leaders invited to take a leading role in organizing the groundbreaking exhibition, “Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery” at the prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art. This exhibition marks the first time a Native American exhibition at the Met has been curated by the community itself. The objects on display were handpicked by members of the Pueblo Pottery Collective, and the labels accompanying the artworks highlight the voices and perspectives of the Pueblo peoples, departing from the traditional museum label style. The exhibition will be open by appointment at the Vilcek Foundation in Manhattan until June 2024, after which it will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Saint Louis Art Museum.
The origins of the group exhibition can be traced back to the School for Advanced Research (SAR) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. SAR, renowned as a scholarly resource center, academic press, and artist residency program, played a crucial role in bringing this exhibition to fruition. Their extensive collection of Pueblo pottery, dating back to 1050-1300, serves as the backbone of “Grounded in Clay.” Initially, the exhibition debuted at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, allowing the Pueblo peoples to be the first to witness and experience their own heritage. Brian D. Vallo, a museum consultant and former governor of Acoma Pueblo, played a pivotal role as a curator in the Vilcek exhibit.
The vision behind the exhibition was to have at least one curator from each Native community involved. Elysia Poon, the director of SAR’s Indian Arts Research Center, reached out to the Vilcek Foundation, which possesses its own impressive pottery collection, proposing a partnership with multiple organizers. The overwhelming response saw over 60 curators, with six from non-Pueblo communities and two who are Native, joining the project. Poon and her team actively engaged with Pueblo communities, visiting and distributing fliers during feast days and cultural events to reach potential participants. Each curator was given the freedom to select one or two clay works and interpret them through essays, poems, or voice recordings. This approach offered a fresh perspective to the exhibition, deviating from the traditional method of selecting artworks first and creating themes around them.
This exhibition presents an alternative approach to the conventional Euro-American practices prevalent in museums. In the past, source communities were often excluded from interpreting their own cultural artifacts, leaving that task to scholars who may lack a personal or emotional connection. However, the guidelines developed by SAR and now embraced by the Met represent a significant shift. They emphasize collaboration between museum professionals and Native communities to document objects, shape their narratives, and enhance Indigenous peoples’ access to collections. Other institutions, such as the Colby Museum of Art at Colby College in Maine, have also adopted similar strategies in partnership with Native community partners, as seen in their current show, “Painted: Our Bodies, Hearts, and Village,” which provides Pueblo perspectives on the Taos Society of Artists.
Tom Eccles, the executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, acknowledges the importance of diversifying voices in exhibition spaces. He notes that curators are not solely knowledgeable individuals but also individuals with unique experiences. By bringing diverse perspectives to the interpretation of artworks, a fundamental change occurs, breaking down traditional barriers.
“Grounded in Clay” showcases not only Native curators from New Mexico’s 19 Pueblo communities but also curators from Arizona (Hopi) and Texas (Ysleta del Sur Pueblo). Dr. Patricia Marroquin Norby, the Met’s associate curator of Native American art (Purépecha), has been collaborating with source communities since assuming her role in 2020. She has worked to incorporate Native perspectives in the American Wing’s Diker collection and exhibitions like “Water Memories.” The scale of collaboration in “Grounded in Clay” stands as an unprecedented endeavor, celebrating the continuation of ancestral traditions by numerous potters. The exhibition offers a glimpse into the intangible, personal, and emotional dimensions of Pueblo pottery, emphasizing its role as a vessel that sustains the Pueblo peoples physically, culturally, and spiritually, as expressed by Dr. Joseph Aguilar, the deputy tribal preservation officer of San Ildefonso Pueblo, in the exhibition catalog.
Featuring more than 50 remarkable pieces, including water jars, storage jars, bowls, and bean pots, the exhibition presents pottery that is as unique as human faces. These vessels, born from earth, fire, and water, reflect the vibrant colors of the Southwest’s mesas, cliffs, and arroyos, showcasing intricate black and white zigzag patterns reminiscent of clouds and lightning, symbolic of the blessings of rain. Others exhibit vibrant painted turkeys, parrots, and turtles. Centuries-old vessels bear the marks of age and use, with scrapes, fissures, bumps, cracks, and indentations that reveal their well-lived lives and deep emotional connections, much like a cherished and worn family cookbook.
Anthony R. Chavarria, curator of ethnography at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, recalls his grandmother’s sparkling micaceous bowl with a piecrust rim and the disagreements that arose over who would claim it for morning cereal. For the exhibition, he found himself drawn to a stone-polished blackware water jar with a high neck and flared rim. Chavarria sees the shape of the jar, with its flared rim resembling a collar, as a reflection of his grandmother’s beauty and the beauty derived from the earth.
Blackware pottery is typically created through a reduction firing process, using dung from cows or sheep to alter the flame. The absence of oxygen, combined with the smoke, turns the warm red clay into a lustrous black. One outstanding example at the Met is a monumental “grandfather” vessel with an iridescent ebony surface created by Lonnie Vigil, a skilled potter from Nambe Pueblo. Vigil meticulously constructed the piece, coil by coil, on his red 1950s Formica kitchen table, showcasing a remarkable feat of architecture balanced by hand and intuition, rather than relying on machines. Nora Naranjo Morse, an artist and poet who is also a curator for the exhibition, describes Vigil’s work as a truly remarkable example of artistic creation emerging from a dream-like state.
Brian Vallo shared in an interview at the Vilcek Foundation that his paternal grandmother, Juana Vallo, used ground black hematite, a mineral, mixed with wild spinach paste as a binder when painting her pots. Gathering the clay was a day-long journey, and Vallo’s grandfather would emphasize the purity of mind required to extract clay easily. For the exhibition, Vallo chose an Acoma water jar adorned with Zuni-inspired birds, playfully referred to by his grandmother as “Zuni Fat Tails.” In Acoma, women would collect rainwater from natural cisterns atop the mesa and carry the bulbous jars on their heads, effectively bearing a cloud.
For the Pueblo peoples, pottery is intertwined with significant life events. These vessels welcome newborns and commemorate loss. Mitchell, the potter, emphasizes the importance of having an ample supply of pots, as one never knows when someone will embark on their final journey.
In addition to showcasing traditional pottery, “Grounded in Clay” also features commissioned works from four contemporary Pueblo artists working in other mediums. These artworks delve into the themes of industrial and environmental exploitation of sacred Indigenous sites. One such example is “Yupkoyvi,” a thought-provoking photographic piece by Michael Namingha, which…
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