Hopi potter Al Qöyawayma was born in Los Angeles in February, 1938. He grew up in the San Fernando Valley, attended Van Nuys High School and went to California Polytechnic Institute for a BS in Engineering, then to the University of Southern California to earn his MS in engineering. He worked for many years in the Defense and Space Industry in the development of inertial guidance systems. He is also a co-founder of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society. Al has also served as Vice-Chairman of the Institute of American Indian Arts and is a Fulbright Fellow to the Maori of New Zealand, working with them to revive their ancient cultural ceramic tradition.

As he was growing up, Al spent summers with his aunt, Polingaysi (Elizabeth White) Qöyawayma, on the Hopi Reservation. From her he learned much about traditional Hopi ceramics and legends. She also instilled in him the family's spiritual challenge as members of the Coyote clan: "We do not walk alone, Great Spirit walks beside us. Always know this and be grateful."

As an artist, Al credits his aunt and Charles Loloma with considerable influence and encouragement. It was they who suggested that they use their backgrounds to step "beyond all Indianisms, to blend tradition with contemporary expression." That has become part of the philosophy behind Al's ceramic artwork. Al says "I am privileged to be present during the creative process, watching as unseen hands and the gift of the Creator's energy flows into my work.".

Some Exhibits that have featured works by Al

• Beauty Speaks for Us. Heard Museum. Phoenix, Arizona. February 10, 2017 - March 31, 2017
• Al Qöyawayma. King Galleries. Scottsdale, Arizona. March 1, 2018. Note: artist opening
• Elegance from Earth: Hopi Pottery. Heard Museum. Phoenix, Arizona. Opened March 24, 2012
• Gifts from the Community. Heard Museum West. Surprise, Arizona. April 12 - October 12, 2008
• Crafted to Perfection: The Nancy & Alan Cameros Collection of Southwestern Pottery. Roswell Museum of Western Art. Corning, NY. November 22, 2007
• Choices and Change: American Indian Artists in the Southwest. Heard Museum North. Scottsdale, AZ. June 30, 2007
• Sole Stories: American Indian Footwear. Heard Museum. Phoenix, AZ. October 21, 2006
• Our Stories: American Indian Art and Culture in Arizona. Heard Museum West. Surprise, Arizona. July 26, 2006 – September 2009
• Home: Native People in the Southwest. Heard Museum. Phoenix, AZ. May 22, 2005
• The Collecting Passions of Dennis and Janis Lyon. Heard Museum. Phoenix, AZ. May 1, 2004
• Jewels of the Southwest. Arizona Historical Society Museum. Tempe, Arizona. February 8 - April 28, 2002
• Hold Everything! Masterworks of Basketry and Pottery from the Heard Museum. Heard Museum. Phoenix, Arizona. November 1, 2001 - March 10, 2002
• Images, Artists, Styles: Recent Acquisitions from the Heard Museum Collection. Heard Museum North. Scottsdale, Arizona. July 2001 - January 2002
• Blue Rain Gallery 2000. Blue Rain Gallery. San Francisco, CA. March 2000
• Fifth Annual Hollywood Premiere. Four Seasons Hotel, Los Angeles, CA. Gallery 10. Scottsdale, AZ. November 23, 1991
• Images from the Mesas. Gallery 10 Inc. Scottsdale, Arizona. February 28, 1985 - March 19, 1985. Note: second annual Hopi exhibit featuring Mary Jane Batala, Rondina Huma, Von Monongya, Dennis Numkena, Al Qoyawayma, and Ramona Sakiestewa
• What's In a Name: Five Superb Hopi Artists. Gallery 10. Scottsdale, Arizona. February 23, 1984
• 1978 Heard Museum Guild Indian Arts and Crafts Exhibit. Heard Museum. Phoenix, Arizona. November 24 - December 2, 1978
• 1977 Heard Museum Guild Indian Arts and Crafts Exhibit. Heard Museum. Phoenix, Arizona. November 25 - December 3, 1977
• 1976 Heard Museum Guild Indian Arts and Crafts Exhibit. Heard Museum. Phoenix, Arizona. November 26 - December 5, 1976

Some of the Awards Al has Won

• 2017 Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market. Classification II Pottery: Best of Classification. Awarded for artwork: 3-Sided Polychrome Vase
• 2017 Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market. Classification II Pottery, Division E - Any Design or Form with Native Materials, Kiln Fired Pottery: First Place. Awarded for artwork: 3-Sided Polychrome Vase
• 2017 Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market: Judge's Award - Jerry Cowdrey. Awarded for artwork: 3-Sided Polychrome Vase
• 2016 Santa Fe Indian Market, Classification II - Pottery: Best of Classification. Awarded for architectural pot "Half Arch Mesa Verde: Three Kivas with Three Ladders"
• 2009 Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market, Classification II - Pottery, Division E - Non-Traditional Design or form with native materials: First Place
• 2005 Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market: Judge's Choice Award
• 2004 Santa Fe Indian Market, Classification II - Pottery, Division G - Non-traditional pottery, using traditional materials and techniques, any form or design, Category 1402 - Vases and bowls, Second Place
• 2004 Santa Fe Indian Market, Classification II - Pottery, Division G - Non-traditional pottery, using traditional materials and techniques, any form or design, Category 1404 - Combined techniques, any shaped vessel: First Place
• 2004 Santa Fe Indian Market, Classification II - Pottery, Division H - Non-traditional pottery using traditional materials and techniques with non-traditional decorative elements, Category 1503 - Combined techniques, any shaped vessel: First Place
• 2002 Santa Fe Indian Market, Classification II - Pottery, Division G - Non-traditional pottery, using traditional materials and techniques, any form or design, Best of Division
• 2002 Santa Fe Indian Market, Classification II - Pottery, Division G - Non-traditional pottery, using traditional materials and techniques, any form or design, Category 1401 - Jars, wedding jars, vases and bowls, Third Place
• 2002 Santa Fe Indian Market, Classification II - Pottery, Division G - Non-traditional pottery, using traditional materials and techniques, any form or design, Category 1403 - Combined techniques, any shaped vessel (must include at least two techniques): First Place
• 2002 Santa Fe Indian Market, Classification II - Pottery, Division G - Non-traditional pottery, using traditional materials and techniques, any form or design, Category 1406 - Items with figures or designs in relief: Second Place
• 1998 Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market: Judge's Choice Award
• 1998 Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market, Classification VI - Pottery: Best of Classification
• 1998 Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market, Classification VI - Pottery, Division B - Traditional/native clay/hand built (unpainted): Best of Division
• 1978 Heard Museum Guild Indian Arts and Crafts Exhibit, Classification VII - Pottery, Division B - Contemporary: Third Place. Awarded for artwork: Vase
• 1978 Heard Museum Guild Indian Arts and Crafts Exhibit, Classification VII - Pottery, Division B - Contemporary: Honorable Mention. Awarded for artwork: Storage Jar
• 1977 Heard Museum Guild Indian Arts and Crafts Exhibit, Classification VII - Pottery, Division D - Kiln Fired: First Place. Awarded for artwork: Slipper bowl with three corn
• 1976 Heard Museum Guild Indian Arts and Crafts Exhibit, Classification X - Pottery, Division B - Contemporary: First Place. Awarded for artwork: Corn jar
• 1976 Heard Museum Guild Indian Arts and Crafts Exhibit, Classification X - Pottery, Division B - Contemporary: Second Place. Awarded for artwork: Kokopelli vase
• 1976 Hopi Marketplace, Pottery Division: First Place, Special Award. Museum of Northern Arizona
• 1976 Annual Scottsdale National Indian Arts Exhibition, Section C - Crafts, Classification VIII - Pottery, Division B - Adaptations: First Place
• 1976 Annual Scottsdale National Indian Arts Exhibition: Popovi Da Memorial Award

The Hopi People

Walpi, as seen by Ansel Adams in 1941

Looking across Tewa Village to First Mesa

The Hopi People and Their Pottery

Pottery was being made in the area of the Hopi mesas before generational migrants from the area of central Mexico began to arrive in the 600's. Those migrants brought a much better ceramic technology with them. They also brought a whole new design vocabulary, architectural advancements, more defined rituals and better seeds, along with other agricultural advancements. They spread out across the Southwest between the Colorado River and the Rio Grande, from the Chihuahua and Sonora deserts north to the Great Salt Lake, and they multiplied. The weather of this countryside was very fickle, though, and they had to discover new ways to store their food and keep it good for years. The best tool for preserving things was pottery. Then they began decorating their pottery with their prayers for the seed within, and for the survival of their people.

For hundreds of years those designs were repetitive geometrics, in black-on-white or black-on-gray-white bisques, most matte but more and more polished as time went on. In the 900's, from the south again, figures in black-on-white were introduced. Then came figures and designs in red-and-black-on-white. Then came figures and designs in various combinations of red, black and white on various backgrounds. Each step in the development of decorative and color schemes is reflective of experiential religious developments within one clan or another, one pueblo or another. A lot of what flowered into what we know now as "Sikyátki style and design" was developed in bits and pieces along the rim of Antelope Mesa. It took the experience of Sikyátki to put it all together. Just as the design palette of Sikyátki reached its peak, the village's chief determined they had strayed too far from the traditionally conservative Hopi path and they needed to be put to death for it. He arranged with the elders of Walpi and other villages to have the deed done and sometime in 1625 it was completed. Everyone in the village was killed except for a few ritual specialists who were saved for their spiritual value.

From a mural found at Awatovi

The styles and designs of Sikyátki lived on on some Awatovi pottery for a few years but the entire design palette changed after the Spanish arrived in force in 1629. San Bernardo Polychrome came into production almost immediately with the reduction in labor force as so many of the Awatovis were forced to serve the priests and build a mission. The design palette changed, too, when all the kachina designs were forced out by the Franciscan priests. Almost everything changed again with the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. There was a general return to themes prevalent before the Spanish arrived across the entire Southwest, except by then most potters were firing their pots using sheep, cow or horse manure. Around the Hopi mesas, a merging of designs and supernaturals with the layouts from the San Bernardo and Sikyatki phases happened. Some archaeologists have termed the pottery that was produced for 100 years after the Pueblo Revolt as "Payupki phase." It faded out around 1780, about the same time the last of the Tiwas and Keresans returned to the Rio Grande Valley from the village of Payupki on Second Mesa. After that came the phases of Polacca Polychrome, including the white-slipped years after the times of drought and disease in the 1800s that were spent at Zuni.

By the mid-1800s, the Hopi pottery tradition had been almost completely abandoned, its utilitarian purposes taken over by cheap enamelware brought in by Anglo traders. Hopi pottery production sputtered along until the 1880's when one woman, Nampeyo of Hano, almost single-handedly revived it. Nampeyo lived in Hano on First Mesa and was inspired by pot sherds found among the nearby ruins of the ancient village of Sikyátki. Like every other potter around First Mesa at the time, Nampeyo was producing jars, bowls and canteens, often with one surface slipped white and decorated with designs in black-and/or-red. At the urging of Anglo traders' Alexander Stephen and Thomas Varker Keam, she began experimenting with polishing the surface of pieces coiled entirely of Jeddito yellow clay and then painting her designs directly on that. Today, credit is given to Nampeyo for fully reviving the Sikyátki style. She was so good that Jesse Walter Fewkes, the first archaeologist to formally excavate Sikyátki, was concerned that her creations would shortly become confused with those made hundreds of years previously.

Sikyátki pottery shapes are very distinctive: flattened jars with wide shoulders; low, open serving bowls decorated inside; seed jars with small openings and flat tops; painting methods of splattering and stippling and very distinctive designs. The Sikyátki style seems to have evolved as various Zuni-, Keres- and Towa-speaking potters came together with Water Clan potters from the Hohokam areas of southern Arizona and northern Mexico, and they began working with clays found in the nearby Jeddito valley area. Over the years, other clans came to the area and made their own contributions to what we now refer to as "Sikyátki Polychrome." According to Jesse Walter Fewkes, that merging of styles, techniques and designs created some of the finest ceramics ever produced in prehistoric North America.

Today's Hopi Pottery

Most Hopi pottery is unmistakable in its shapes, colors and designs. The Hopis are blessed with multiple excellent clay sources, each offering a different deep color after polishing and firing. Most Hopi pottery uses a buff, red, white or yellow clay body. Some kachina carvers make pottery and sometimes carve and etch their surfaces. Most Hopi potters, though, form their pieces and paint their decorations using colors derived from boiled-down plants, watered-down clay and from crushed minerals.

Much of the symbology painted on Hopi pottery is themed with "bird elements:" eagle and parrot tails, feathers, beaks and wings, and with katsinam (images of their gods) and permutations of migration patterns. Many Hopi, Hopi-Tewa and Tewa potters are members of the Corn Clan and their annual religious cycle revolves around the seasons of corn. The vast majority of today's Hopi pottery shapes and the designs painted on them are obvious descendants of the work of potters who existed 200-and-more years ago.

The above paragraph applies mostly to potters from the vicinity of First Mesa. The few potters from Second and Third Mesas seem to derive their design palettes from farther back in time, to the geometric designs, patterns and figures of the rock art prevalent before the advent of the katsinam, and the emergence of the Medicine, Sacred Clown and Warrior societies 800 years ago.

The view south from near Old Oraibi

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