June 2009 – December 2009
American Indians in the southwestern United States have practiced pottery making for nearly 2,000 years. While it is unknown exactly when or where the craft was first practiced in the region, pottery first appears in sites around 500 CE. Pottery making was gradually introduced to the area through long-distance trade with Mexico and Central America—regions with a much longer history of the craft. The earliest southwestern pots are plain gray or painted black-on-gray. Some show basketry impressions on the outside, indicating that baskets were used as a support to form the base of a pot. Present-day potters often use the base of a broken pot or a small bowl for this purpose.
As people became more sedentary and new groups settled in the region, pottery became increasingly refined. Smaller groups within the area developed distinctive decorative styles based on local clay sources, their own traditions, and contact with neighboring and outside groups. Today's residents of twelve Hopi villages in Arizona and nineteen Pueblo villages in New Mexico are all descended from people who populated the region in extended-family settlements as early as the first millennium BCE. In addition to the Pueblo groups who continue to live and flourish in their ancient homeland, there are other native southwestern groups that have long pottery traditions, notably the Maricopa, who live near Phoenix, and the Navajo, whose reservation covers northeastern Arizona, as well as portions of New Mexico and Utah.
Until the late nineteenth century, pottery usually served a utilitarian function within the potter's own community. Potters shared in the communal sense of how a pot should look, and there was little incentive to make any changes. With the adoption of mass-produced ceramic and metal containers through trade, an increasing influx of tourists, and the gradual growth of an art market, potters experimented with new forms, materials, and designs.
This process continues today. Some full-time potters regularly extend the craft's boundaries, and others make traditional pots that look exactly like those made hundreds of years ago. The old and the new exist side by side, and American Indian pottery in the Southwest has never been more diverse or more refined. Today, several thousand artists, both men and women, young and old, produce pottery. Their reasons are as varied as their pots, but each is helping to continue their cultural traditions. This exhibition features pottery from the collection of the Department of Anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences, including eighty pieces from the Ruth and Charles Elkus Collection.
Photography is not permitted.
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