Potter blends traditional, contemporary
Jody Naranjo is named Living Treasure for this year
The materials that award-winning potter Jody Naranjo (Santa Clara) uses to build her pots speak of home and history. She collects brown clay from Santa Clara Pueblo, white volcanic ash from the Pojoaque hills and the glittery micaceous clay of northern New Mexico. After shaping and sculpting the coiled pots in her northeast Albuquerque studio, she returns to her mother’s place at Santa Clara to fire them in a backyard pit using a traditional technique with wood and manure.
But Naranjo’s visions in clay also communicate a joyous present, with proud young women, cherished animals
and beautiful architecture. She achieves a wide range of textures, patterns and colors by using various types of clay, hand tools and acrylics.
The effect is warm and welcoming.
“I want people to see them and smile,” she said.
Naranjo, 48, has been named this year’s Living Treasure for the annual Native Treasures Indian Arts Festival today through Sunday at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center. The event benefits the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture on Museum Hill.
The festival includes 200 artists representing 40 tribes and pueblos throughout Native America. Ticket prices are $125 per person for a gala tonight; $25 for early morning entry on Saturday; and $10 for later entry on Saturday; it is free on Sunday.
Naranjo, from a long line of potters, learned the art form first from her mother and grandmother, both well-known potters.
She began working with the clay from “the time I could hold it” and was selling her pottery on the portal of the Palace of the Governors at age 15.
Making pottery has always been her job, she said. It’s a physically demanding practice requiring hand and body strength, plus repetitive motions to deliver smooth surfaces and precision for tiny, perfect details.
Pottery — “the first art form,” she said — offers an opportunity to pour any stress that may circle around her into a focused stillness.
“It is my calm, my center,” she said.
The sculpted lip on much of her pottery is in honor of her grandmother. Her roots trace from not just Santa Clara, but also Taos Pueblo, she said.
The animals and “pueblo girls” that are often a part of her work are contemporary and “relatable,” she said. Her eye-friendly designs have appeared on Pendleton blankets, as well.
The often smiling animals and the “girls” come from her own experience as a mother and animal lover. They’re a source of joy, as well as stress, she said.
“I have a million animals, three children, two husbands,” she added with a laugh.
Along with the pots she’s assembled for the show beginning today, scattered throughout her home, studio and backyard are sculptures of birds, dinosaurs, rabbits and other cartoonish critters.
The round-bellied creatures are usually works to be sold or traded, but also serve as teaching tools for any young hands that wish to learn beginners’ techniques, she said.
First, you shape the round belly, then you add simple wings, legs, neck, head, big ears and maybe a beak or big eyes.
In the kitchen, one of her birds has a place of honor. Its pot belly has a rosy luminescence, but it also sports a few cracks and evidence of repairs, she points out.
Years ago, when one of her daughters was young, the little girl fell in love with the bird and hid it from her mom whenever the artist was preparing for a show. The bird would be discovered in the girl’s bedroom and then, pragmatically, it would find a place on the display table for sale.
But her daughter kept up the defensive stance.
“She’d stand in front of it and wouldn’t let people look at it,” she said.
It always found its way home.