CLICK HERE TO VIEW ALL THE BOWLS IN THE SHOW
Pueblo potters have been creating pottery for home use on New Mexico’s pueblos for perhaps 1000 years. The forms of these potteries have varied with the needs and customs of the times. There have been jars (for seeds, water, storage), cups, ladles, figures; and tourist forms such as storytellers, ashtrays, animal effigies, pipes, and miniatures.
But the form that we are celebrating in this show is, perhaps, the most grounded in home, food, family and nurturing—bowls. There are different types of bowls (arbitrarily named at best). Dough bowls, large and deep, for kneading dough, storing bread or bathing babies (10+” deep and more than 18″ diameter); Dough or serving bowls, around 12″-14″ diameter; and chile or stew bowls, smaller bowls for individual food portions. Like the many members of a family, each form has it’s own unique place in the home, and in the history of its people.
All these types of Bowls from every pueblo are represented in this show. The painted bowls of Zuni, Santo Domingo, Cochiti, San Ildefonso, Tesuque, Acoma, and Zia, and the plain-ware (unpainted bowls) of Nambe, Santa Clara and San Juan (Ohkay Owingeh).
We invite you to join us in this immersion of fine historic bowls.
1. A 13″ deep, 20″ wide Santo Domingo dough bowl, c. 1885 with simple 2-3 parallel bar motif but massive in size and astonishing in its near perfect form.
2. A Santo Domingo/Cochiti hybrid bowl, decorated on the interior and exterior, c. 1890’s
3. A Tesuque or Cochiti early plain-ware bowl with painted split leaves or nuts on the interior only, c. 1880’s-1890’s.
4. 2 beautiful San Ildefonso polychrome bowls, one an early gorgeous example from the Bertha Dutton collection, attributed strongly to Maria and Julian Martinez, c. 1920; and the other decorated inside and out, but with an unusual form with structural rainbow bands at both the top and bottom.
5. 2 significant and very early 1850’s-1880’s Zia bowls with traditional bowl motifs and each with gorgeous patina; one very deep and large and one 14″ wide; possibly made by same potter or family.
6. An early 20th century San Ildefonso dough bowl with ancient Sankawi designs, attributed to Maria and Julian and very possibly commissioned by Edgar Lee Hewitt who asked Maria and other potters to base pottery designs on old potteries in the collection of the old Laboratory of Anthropolgy; c. 1905
7. An unusual Zuni bowl, c. 1880 with interior double rainbow of red and black just under the rim and male and female turkey forms in the inner bowl; possibly a home replacement bowl for one collected by James Stevenson for the Smithsonian in 1880.
8. A grouping of Santo Domingo mid-sized dough bowls, meticulously chosen by a Scottsdale collector for classic design coupled with beautiful surfaces with rich patina. One and two.
9. Two (first & second) 19th century San Juan plain-ware bowls with Micaceous glitter and rich red/brown color variations.
10. A contemporary large and stunning Nambe pueblo micaceous dough bowl by former Indian Market Best of Show winner Lonnie Vigil.