Next things
Jody Naranjo
Jody Naranjo is evolving. During more than four decades, she’s made a name for herself as a traditional potter with a signature design style. Her human and animal forms are rooted in the culture of Santa Clara Pueblo, where she’s from. For most of her life, she’s worked 15-hour days in her studio, her rhythms broken only by caring for her children and traveling to art shows to sell her work. But molding clay from sunrise to sunset isn’t as easy as it once was. At 51, Naranjo’s body is succumbing to the effects of age and repetitive motion.
“As I’m getting older, I can’t see. And my hands shake,” she says. “It’s an internal tremor. It’s getting worse. I’ve got arthritis. I’ve got carpal tunnel syndrome. My pottery is always going to be my thing, but I can’t do it every day.”
A potter’s livelihood is tied to her physical longevity. Naranjo still has plenty of life in front of her, so, in order to continue challenging herself as an artist while reducing some of potting’s body burdens, she’s extrapolating her designs into other mediums.
“During this whole pandemic, I’ve been sitting at home and drawing, trying to get all these designs into two-dimensional forms, so that I can use them for different patterns, on fabric or just about anything,” she says.
Naranjo worked with a graphic designer and a distributor to create a limited-edition run of animal-print protective masks (available at jodynaranjo.com). And the Blue Rain Print Shop (bluerainprintshop.com) features her Pueblo Girls characters on a line of luggage, messenger bags, travel cups, and even flip-flops. Naranjo’s recently completed her third collaboration with Seattle-based glass artist Preston Singletary (Tlingit) opens at Blue Rain Gallery on Friday, March 26.
For the 16 pieces in A Collaboration in Glass III, Naranjo drew pottery shapes that Singletary then blew into life in his shop. He shipped them to Naranjo, in Albuquerque, where she carved her designs into a rubberized stencil with an X-acto knife, and then sent the vessels back to Seattle. In the final step, Singletary used a sandblaster to etch Naranjo’s designs into the glass. The brightly colored vessels appear lit from within, which is an aesthetic Singletary utilizes in his more sculptural work.
“I put an interior color of transparent glass, and then I layer-up the exterior with a glass powder, so
it’s melted into the surface of the vessel. Then I’ll start to shape and form it,” Singletary says. “When I started in glass, I was making more classical shapes, so working with Jody is like going back to my roots.”
When they first began collaborating in 2013, Naranjo assumed she would be limited to the same colors she finds in clay. “He said to pick colors, so I picked brown, red, black. He’s like, ‘Come on, Jody, give it some oomph.’ He said I could use any color I want. I was like, Purple! Turquoise!”
Now, years into working together, Singletary is as likely to present Naranjo with new color schemes as she is to choose her own. He offered her the turquoise blue on cobalt blue of Earth (2021), which she then carved with horses, birds, turtles, rabbits, and other animals. Sunset Stampede (2021) is salmon pink, 11 inches high and 13 inches in diameter. Three rows of gently smiling, off-white horses run around the outside. They look like what might’ve resulted if the artist Keith Haring had tried his hand at ledger art. Naranjo says she’s heard the Haring comparison before and has even been commissioned to make pots with Haring’s designs.
“I’ve never been one for realism,” she says. “Even in art school, I just couldn’t do it.” Naranjo studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts for a few years in the late 1980s and early ’90s, and then, when she was 23, she won first place in contemporary sgraffito at the 1992 SWAIA Indian Market in Santa Fe. In 2011, she earned the market’s first-place prize in pottery. In 2017, she was named a Living Treasure by the Museum
of Indian Arts and Culture, and in 2018, she was honored with the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. Her work is in numerous private collections, as well as the permanent collections of MIAC, and the Smithsonian, Heard, Panhandle-Plains, and Eiteljorg museums.
Blue Rain Gallery’s executive director, Denise Phetteplace, calls Naranjo’s designs lighthearted and approachable, no matter what medium she’s working in. Regardless of what might be driving her to experiment with other mediums, Phetteplace says, “Any artist who has been working their lifetime in a particular medium will eventually realize there are limitations to what they’re doing, no matter how good they are, no matter how much they have challenged themselves. She can only push clay so far.
“Even though we associate a fragility with glass, when it’s in its molten state, there’s a real plasticity to it that allows this expansiveness and creative opportunity. I think it’s exciting for Jody to be able to step out of the pottery box, if you will, and just go for it in a bigger way.”
Blue Rain also sells Naranjo’s bronze animal figures. She makes these sculptural pieces pop with brightly colored or even iridescent acrylic paint. They have the look of clean-lined Muppets, as if they would be soft to the touch, despite being made of metal. The bronze work is an extension of making such figures out of clay with her three daughters, who grew up watching her work.
“They’d say, ‘Make a fish! Make a Mr. Potato Head!’ The designs I knew were deer and turtles and fish — traditional designs. The kids had them all over the house. People would come to buy pottery, and they would say how cool they were.”
But is it possible to turn her back on tradition? Santa Clara clay connects Naranjo to nearly every member of her family, many of whom are household names in the Indigenous art world. She digs four kinds of clay by hand from New Mexico earth. Santa Clara clay is soft and brown. The mica she needs for sheen and hardness comes from Picuris Pueblo, in Taos, and the volcanic ash lives in Pojoaque. She gets the red clay, used for polishing, at Cochiti Pueblo.
“After it rains, there’ll be these little clay things coming down that come off the ground and crackle,” she says. “That’s a vein. A coffee can full lasts me about a year.”
Sometimes, when she’s making clay coils or polishing her pots, Naranjo watches television or talks on the phone. Other times, “I’m thanking my ancestors for giving me this. It’s been going on so long, we don’t even know how many generations. It’s my life. When I’m out and around, I’m looking at the hills, at the different colors of clays. My whole life has revolved around clay and pottery since I was a kid. Sitting there next to my mom or my grandma, at Indian Market, or on the Plaza, since I was a little girl.”
She builds a pot one coil at a time, lets it dry for a week, and then sands down the outside, starting with a coarse sandpaper and working up to a fine grain. After that, she polishes, getting the surface as shiny as possible. Another week of waiting passes while the clay dries completely, and then Naranjo fires the pot in a hole in the ground that’s fitted with bricks and old tin pieces.
“I chop cedarwood and put it all the way around, and it lights up for maybe 30 minutes. It burns really hot and really fast. Ceramicists always ask me about the temperature, but we never measure it.”
The darker browns and blacks of Santa Clara pottery come from smothering the pieces with dried cow manure during the firing process. Naranjo achieves grays and browns by sprinkling manure around the pots and letting the smoke work its magic. Finally, once the pot has cooled, she etches her designs into the surface with an X-ACTO knife.
“My family does this etching, called sgraffito,” she says. “My grandfather used a nail.”
Naranjo starting making pots when she was six years old. Her hands know each step of the process. But something has to give and, during the pandemic, she’s had plenty of time to re-evaluate.
“I’m ready to slow down. I’ll still do my pottery, but not at the same scale. With bronzes, I can make one clay figure, and we can create 10 of them. The glass, I’m designing but I’m not building. The merchandise is designing, not building. I see this as my future. I’m a grandmother now. Me and my grandson, we just want to play and play and play.”