Power of the People
POTTERY OF THE SAN ILDEFONSO PUEBLO IS A BEACON OF CREATIVITY AND EXPRESSION FUELED BY THE COMMUNAL STRENGTH OF ITS PEOPLE.
Pottery of the San Ildefonso
Pueblo is a beacon of creativity and expression fueled by the communal strength of its people.
Pottery making is a prayer, pottery making is creating life. Pottery, too, has profound significance; the creation of pottery is the combining of two sacred and fertile substances—water and earth—combining them to make a new life. Designs on pottery are neither iconographic, metaphoric nor symbolic but rather become the form that is painted—a leaf form is a leaf, a painted feather is prayer or breath. Painting infuses pottery with sacredness. These arts are visual prayer.
Making pottery and painting is making life; those lives reside in the works that will be part of this exhibition. Pottery incorporates a myriad of ideas from ancient design iconography to new tools and materials. But at the core of pottery sits an accurate presenting of the values and principles of Pueblo cosmology. When we speak of pottery we are hearing these values; the principles of honoring the creation through the way lives are lived. “I am prayerful when I gather my clay,” a friend tells us. She continues, “My mother and grandmother dug their clay here, as did their aunties and mothers, so I am prayerful, respectful of this place and bring only good thoughts.” Like people, pottery prays for continuity of the community, for the goodness and wholeness of people.
San Ildefonso has long been a center for production and creativity of dynamic and unique pottery. Although a small village, this extraordinary set of artists have practiced over the last 300 years more techniques and styles than any of the other Pueblo villages. Pottery is community. Importantly, great pottery making traditions belong to the village rather than any one person or family; these traditions and styles are not attributable to one person or family but belong to everyone and are the responsibility for every Pueblo member to nurture.
Pottery, or more precisely, its aesthetics and production are ritualized behavior, serving as a critical and material conceptual ideal of the San Ildefonso world. As San Ildefonso people remind us, “Our history is recorded in pottery.”
Our work is using new methodologies of combining Native ethnogenesis, discussions with descendant community members, and museum object and archival research, developing a holistic approach and portrait of artisans, art production and social
contexts. This allows us to take a unique approach to best tell the stories of San Ildefonso art through their own interpretations and meanings though better appreciation of the history, contexts and meanings of San Ildefonso art, culture and history.
In August an exhibition will open at Santa Fe’s Museum of Indian Arts & Culture that will include largely unknown and rarely seen collections, many of the pieces never exhibited. Pottery from the Indian Arts Fund is included to further elucidate the meanings and beauty of pottery. A vital goal of the exhibition is to move pottery that has largely sat on museum storage shelves into the limelight certainly where they can be appreciated, but more importantly, where present and future generations of San Ildefonso people will have access to the collections. In addition, access means that the embodied cultural elements in the pottery can be reunited with the living consciousness of Tewa people.
The exhibition is focused on changing perceptions and understandings by presenting new research and information dedicated to San Ildefonso pottery of the last three centuries—as we say in the Native arts world, “changing the narrative.” The work is about developing the contexts and art histories to better appreciate and admire San Ildefonso potters; about Native explanatory principals. Finally, although widely written about and collected San Ildefonso art is by and large understood from a non-native perspective. We hope to begin to construct an insider or more Native perspective. An important part of this “insider” understanding is the de-emphasis on individuals and the habit of naming potters as innovators or inventors. Instead we are asking exhibition visitors to immerse themselves in centuries long traditions in which the community works together. The materials are part of the land and belong to everyone and everyone uses the same materials.
San Ildefonso pottery changed at every great social event—the migration from the north, the arrival of the Spanish, the aftermath of the cruel Re-conquest by the Spanish and the arrival of the Americans. Pottery is a social tool, whether mediating San Ildefonso people’s settlement on new lands during the 14th century, adaptation to Spanish colonization, or to the onset of cash economy and the 20th-century market for Pueblo art pottery.
By far the most numerous pottery of the prespanish era was Biscuit wares as indicated by ancestral sites. Biscuit A wares date from 1375 to 1450 and Biscuit B from 1450 to 1620. The designs on this pottery style goes from small abstracted plant forms to elegantly painted birds, flowers and leaves. The cream colored slip and black guaco paint are the same materials available to San Ildefonso potters today, meaning that for over half a millennium pottery has continually been made with the same materials.
The style of pottery known as Biscuit ware, a soft clay with a cream slip and black organic paint was made pre-1600, pre-hispanic colonization of New Mexico. Biscuit wares continued post-1600 until 1680 in two new varieties: Sankawi and Biscuit C or Cuyamungue.
Sankawi and Sakona are similar to Biscuit wares but the jars have long necks and polished surfaces; some still consider these pots as Biscuit wares.
In 1600, following three centuries of rather consistent pottery development, potters over the next few decades began making radically new pottery styles in response to the Spanish and their rule.
Pottery changed as new foods and other foreign ideas were introduced along the northern Rio Grande. These wares are known as Tewa polychrome, carrying forward some design ideas from the 16th-century settlements on the Pajarito. We might also see precedents of Tewa polychrome jar shapes in Sakona and Sankawi black and white pottery. Tewa polychrome is distinguished by its all over covering of red slip. Pojoaque polychrome is the same pottery but with a slightly deeper tone, an almost purplish red slip. Around the belly of the pot are white bands onto which are organic painted designs of birds, feathers, plants and mountains. A European style soup bowl is a commonly made article, with its shallow bowl and broad, flat rim—the entire bowl red and the rim white with extraordinary variety of designs that appear to have come from Spanish and Tewa influences.
San Ildefonso polychrome manufacture increased through the 17th century. In addition, during the historic period there is considerable increase in the presence of micaceous wares and polished black pottery, also known as Kapo black. Both have been suggested as the introductions of Mexican Indigenous populations who came to New Mexico with the Spanish (Hurt and Dick 1946, Warren 1979-90). We recently asked a San Ildefonso potter about this to which we received the reply, “That seems logical.”
Dramatic changes in pottery began between 1740 and 1780 in relation to vast social changes brought on by a declining Pueblo population as a result of a small pox epidemic and unrelenting raids by Apachean, Ute, Navajo and Comanche Indians. Other momentous changes included the full integration of wheat agriculture in the pueblos. Throughout the period, Pueblos adapted to changing circumstances of a dwindling population and increasing political and social pressure from the ascendant Spanish. Nowhere is this clearer than in pottery production.
By the middle of the 18th century, wheat agriculture and new trading patterns resulted in new pottery forms: most notably, large round bottomed storage jars and large, thick walled bowls for mixing and rising bread dough. Storage jars having the same basic capacity suggests they doubled as measurement devices.
The bringing of wheat agriculture into a San Ildefonso village was a complicated endeavor, particularly during the highly nativistic period that followed the harsh treatment of San Ildefonso people during and following the Re-conquest. Growing wheat meant that Spanish culture and ideas would take up residence in homes and village. Pottery served a dual role of separating and including—the specialized pottery helped hold separate wheat from
the cosmology of San Ildefonso plant life, while, additionally and simultaneously transformed wheat to be included in San Ildefonso cosmology by containing it in a ceramic container made of San Ildefonso fertile substances and covered with designs that are San Ildefonso prayer for fertility and moisture.
During this historic period there was considerable increase in the presence of micaceous wares and polished black pottery, also known as Kapo black. Both have been suggested as the introductions of Mexican Indigenous populations who came to New Mexico with the Spanish. Changing settlement patterns of the Jicarilla Apache from a nomadic to agricultural lifestyle in the mid-19th century may have revitalized micaceous wares in the upper Rio Grande area.
Until the 1880s all of New Mexico’s population relied on Pueblo made pottery for daily household use. A visitor noted in 1857 that that Pueblo pottery “is in universal use in the territory.” Museum collections attest to the various serving and eating bowls, cooking and water jars, and the relish bowls and vinegar jars in use in Puebloan, Spanish and American homes.
A great change in pottery began in the late 1870s, probably instigated by increased pressures from the American world and the florescence of new ideas in shapes, slips and design. No doubt, potters reacted to the increased availability of manufactured goods and the mounting numbers of tourists by producing pottery for sale and/or abandoning pottery for industrialized products such as metal pails, cheap china and enamelware. Pueblo economies needed the goods sold in Santa Fe. Pottery was a source of cash—older pots were sold or pieces were specifically made for the Southwestern tourist market. Cash provided the means to buy coffee, sugar, baking powder, flour, cloth, farm tools, milled lumber, doors and windows. While the Spanish Southwest had largely depended on a barter economy, the American Southwest was a cash economy.
Between 1875 and 1910 relatively no changes occurred in the repertoire of San Ildefonso pottery. The same wares made for home use could be sold to pueblo visitors or to the traders and curio dealers in Santa Fe. These pots are in museum and private collections and include a great florescence of form and painting by the great pottery making families of the village.
Since the arrival of the Spanish, land and water rights had always been contentious. But beginning in the 1890s, land and water rights were increasingly undermined and ignored, making farming, which had sustained people for millennia, at times nearly impossible. Moreover, the American government put ever increasing pressure on people to acculturate to the broader American society through Indian boarding schools and encouraging large-scale Christian evangelical oversight of U.S. government Indian policy. Buying foods such as flour became increasingly necessary along with an increasing reliance and partiality to store purchased goods and products. But cash was needed to purchase or trade for these goods. There were tiny amounts of wage labor available but if people wanted to continue to live at San Ildefonso there was practically nothing to do to earn money expect sell