Les Namingha was born in 1967 at Zuni Pueblo. His mother, Irene Vicenti, was Zuni and his father, Emerson Namingha, Jr. was Hopi-Tewa (the son of Rachel Namingha Nampeyo). Les learned early in life how to blend traditions and influences. At the age of eleven he went to live with a host family in Salt Lake City, UT, during the school year and spent the summers at his mother's home at Zuni Pueblo. That continued until he finished high school in 1985. From high school he went to Brigham Young University and earned his BFA in Design in 1992.

While in college, Les spent summers at his aunt Dextra's at Hopi, learning the basic methods and cultural traditions of making Hopi pottery from her. What he learned in the academic setting combined with what he learned from Dextra has helped him to develop his own potting style with its unique blend of Hopi and Zuni shapes and designs. He began participating in Santa Fe Indian Market as a potter in 1992, earning Best of Division in both traditional and non-traditional pottery and a Best of Class award in pottery in 1997.

Though he's highly accomplished in traditional Hopi ceramics, Les continues to challenge himself in new directions of thought and expression. He plays at the intersection of traditional and contemporary in all his shapes and designs. With his pottery, this blend is manifest in the Hopi-Tewa and Zuni motifs and patterns that he renders in the prehistoric way through his contemporary eye.

Les signs his work: "LES NAMiNGHA" and sometimes adds the year.

Some Exhibits that Featured Pieces by Les

• Place, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art. Yale University Art Gallery. New Haven, Connecticut. November 1, 2019 - June 21, 2020
• What's New in New: Selections from the Carol Warren Collection. Lloyd Kiva New Gallery, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture. Santa Fe, New Mexico. June 3, 2018 - February 26, 2019. Note: exhibiting works include art by artists Tony Abeyta, Autumn Borts-Medlock, Preston Duwyenie, Tammy Garcia, Dan Namingha, Les Namingha, Jody Naranjo, Roxanne Swentzell, and Tito Naranjo
• Catch 22: Paradox on Paper. Ralph T. Coe Foundation for the Arts. Santa Fe, New Mexico. August 12, 2017 - March 31, 2018. Note: group show curated by Nina Sanders and based on the Edward J. Guarino Collection
• Les Namingha: New Painting. Blue Rain Gallery, Railyard Arts District. Santa Fe, New Mexico. August 17, 2016 - August 21, 2016
• Unrivaled: Clay. King Galleries & Virgil Ortiz. Santa Fe, New Mexico. August 19, 2016
• Elegance from Earth: Hopi Pottery. Heard Museum. Phoenix, Arizona. March 24, 2012 - April 6, 2014
• Choices and Change: American Indian Artists in the Southwest. Heard Museum North. Scottsdale, AZ. 2007
• Our Stories: American Indian Art and Culture in Arizona. Heard Museum West. Surprise, AZ. 2006
• The Collecting Passions of Dennis and Janis Lyon. Heard Museum. Phoenix, AZ. May 2004 - September 2004
• Every Picture Tells a Story. Heard Museum. Phoenix, AZ. 2002
• Indian Market: New Directions in Southwestern Native American Pottery. Peabody Essex Museum. Salem, MA. November 16, 2001 - March 17, 2002
• Hold Everything! Masterworks of Basketry and Pottery from the Heard Museum. Heard Museum. Phoenix, AZ. November 1, 2001 - March 10, 2002
• Blue Rain Gallery 2000. Blue Rain Gallery. Fort Mason, San Francisco, CA. March 24, 2000 - March 26, 2000
• Blue Rain Gallery. Ellipse Arts Center, Arlington, VA. March 26, 1999 - March 28, 1999
• 14th Annual Phoenix Indian Center Bola Tie Dinner and Awards Banquet. Phoenix Indian Center. Phoenix, AZ. Collectors Choice Artist. April 4, 1997 - April 6, 1997
• Succeeding Generations. Faust Gallery. Scottsdale, AZ. 1997

Some of the Awards Les has Won

• 2013 Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market, classification II - Pottery, Div F - Non-traditional Design or Form with Non-Native Materials: First Place
• 1999 Santa Fe Indian Market. Santa Fe, NM. Class. II - Pottery, Div H - Non-traditional pottery, Best of Division;
  - Cat. 1504 - Jars and vases, First Place, Second Place
• 1998 Santa Fe Indian Market, Classification II - Pottery, Division E - Traditional Pottery Jars, Category 1207 - Jars, Zuni: First Place
• 1998 Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market: Judges Choice Award
• 1997 Santa Fe Indian Market. Santa Fe, NM. Challenge Award in Non-traditional painting, drawing and graphics. Class. II - Pottery, Best of Classification;
  - Div. E - Traditional pottery, jars, painted designs on matte or semi-matte surface, Best of Division
  - Cat. 1207, First Place
• 1997 Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market. Heard Museum. Phoenix, AZ. Class. VII - Pottery, Div. A - Traditional native clay/hand-built/painted, Honorable Mention
• 1994 Santa Fe Indian Market. Santa Fe, NM. Class. II - Pottery, Div. F - Traditional pottery, painted designs on matte or semi-matte surface jars, Cat. 1301 - Jars, Hopi (up to 9" tall), Second Place;
  - Div. G - Traditional pottery, painted designs on matte or semi-matte surface - all forms except jars, Cat. 1404 - Other bowl forms (over 9" in diameter), First Place
• 1993 Santa Fe Indian Market. Santa Fe, NM. Class. II - Pottery, Div. G - Traditional pottery, painted designs on matte or semi-matte surface, Cat. 1403 - Other bowl forms up to 9" in diameter, Second Place

The Hopi People

Walpi, as seen by Ansel Adams in 1941

The Hopi People and Their Pottery

Looking across Tewa Village to First Mesa

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.

A mural from 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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