Artists Formerly Known
All Pueblos
Several hundred years ago, during the times of the great Southwest migrations, communal feasting developed as a means of meet-and-greet for integrating or rejecting newcomers into established villages. That's about the same time large open serving bowls came into existence. Families would prepare their specialty dish and bring it to share at the feast in their own bowls. When the feast was over, they retrieved their bowls and went back home until next time. They found ways to differentiate each family's bowls from the others, making them easy to recognize and retrieve. Those innovations have, in some cases, carried forward almost to today. Some were in the actual construction of the pots while others were in the execution of the decorations on them.
For instance, Nampeyo was known to have added an extra coil to the rims of her pieces, as she was aware of that being a breakage point should the piece actually be put into some kind of use. Today, "use" is not a consideration and rims have consequently become very thin. Nampeyo was also known for decorations that were slightly off balance, not quite direct copies of anything else on the piece.
Florentino Montoya, of San Ildefonso, was known for particular off-balance flourishes in his designs, used today to identify his pieces as he never signed any. He and his wife, Martina Vigil, were making pottery in the late 1800's. It was they who got Maria Martinez started when she was a young girl.
In general, most pieces of pottery made before the early 1950's were unsigned, their creators, for the most part, now unknown. Only a very few potters, ones who had become convinced of the monetary value of their name on the bottom of a piece, signed anything.
Maria Martinez of San Ildefonso was one of the very first, beginning in 1922. That caused a problem as the outside world then came looking for her in particular, as someone they really wanted to do business with. Then, in 1926, she added her husband's name to the signature as he was doing all the decorating for her. That caused another upheaval among the pueblos as the making of pottery was long considered to be "women's work."
Nampeyo, at Hopi, was also getting established as a potter of note around the same time, but she never learned English, never learned to read or write. As Nampeyo went blind and other members of her family began painting for her, some would sign pieces with her name and theirs, as in "Nampeyo Fannie," on a pot made by Nampeyo and painted by her daughter Fannie. Nampeyo's niece Daisy painted some, too, usually signing some version of "Nampeyo Daisy" or "Nampeyo DHN". Nampeyo's daughter, Annie Healing, worked side by side with Nampeyo for years, doing a lot of her decorating, but Annie never signed either name to anything. At this point in time, we know what to look for to attribute the making and decorating of a pot to Nampeyo but with pieces made after about 1920, it's essentially impossible to tell what was done by Nampeyo and what was done by Annie.
As the outside world began to learn of Nampeyo's art and the art being produced by others on the Hopi mesas, some of the traders, dealers and archaeologists who went to Hopi found that most potters had a hard time reading and writing English. They also didn't recognize the English names that had been given to them. Knowing the value of being able to attribute a particularly well-done piece to a particular potter, the dealers and traders began putting effort into getting the potters to develop "hallmarks," icons to use as identifiers. Marcia Rickey, with her "Flying Ant" avatar was one of the first of those. Sadie Adams with her five-petaled flower was another. Others developed over the years include "Frogwoman" (Navasie family), "Featherwoman" (Naha family), "Carried in Beauty" (Preston Duwyenie), "Antelope Woman" (Zella Cheeda) and more. In the early 1950's that developed into more full-scale signatures, although many continued adding family and clan hallmarks, some just adding small indicators of their own (such as: a distinct "Featherwoman" feather with an "S", meaning Sylvia Naha).
The 1950's saw a renaissance in pottery making among virtually all the pueblos, and with that came full signatures almost everywhere, some with hallmarks and some without. And some potters still use only hallmarks...
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Acoma Pueblo
Sky City
According to Acoma oral history, the sacred twins led their ancestors to "Aaku," a magical mesa composed mostly of white rock, and instructed those ancestors to make that mesa their home. Acoma Pueblo is called "Sky City" because of its position atop the mesa. Acoma is located about 60 miles west of Albuquerque.
According to some archaeologists, a large group of Keres-speaking people left the Chaco Canyon area in the late 900s. They headed south, around the west side of the Mount Taylor volcano and across the Rio San Jose to Aaku, where they merged into a pueblo of people already living there.
Acoma, Old Oraibi (at Hopi) and Taos all lay claim to being the oldest continuously inhabited community in the U.S. Those competing claims are hard to settle as each village can point to archaeological remnants close by to substantiate each village's claim. While the people of Acoma have an oral tradition that says they've been living in the same area for more than 2,000 years, some archaeologists feel more that the present pueblo was established near the end of the major migrations of the 1200s and 1300s. The location is essentially on the boundary between the Mimbres-Mogollon to the south and west, and Ancestral Puebloan cultures to the north and east. Each of those cultures has had an impact on the styles and designs of Acoma pottery, especially since modern potters have been getting the inspiration for many of their designs from ancient potsherds they have found while walking on pueblo lands.
Francisco Vasquez de Coronado ascended the cliff to visit the Acomas in 1540. He afterward wrote that he "repented having gone up to the place." But the Spanish came back again, and kept coming back. In 1598 relations between the Spanish and the Acomas took a really bad turn with the arrival of Don Juan de Oñaté and the soldiers, settlers and Franciscan monks that accompanied him. After ascending to the mesa top, Oñaté decided to force the Acomas to swear loyalty to the King of Spain and to the Pope. When the Acomas realized what the Spanish meant by that, a group of Acoma warriors attacked a group of Spanish soldiers and killed 11 of them, including one of Oñaté's nephews.
Don Juan de Oñaté retaliated by attacking the pueblo, burning most of it and killing more than 600 people. Another 500 people were imprisoned by the Spanish: males between the ages of 12 and 25 were sold into slavery and 24 men over the age of 25 had their right foot amputated. Many of the women over the age of 12 were also forced into slavery and were eventually parceled out among Catholic convents in Mexico City. Two Hopi men also captured at Acoma had one hand cut off. Then they were released and sent home to spread the word about Spain's resolve to subjugate the inhabitants of Nuevo Mexico.
When word of the massacre and the punishments meted out got back to King Philip in Spain, he banished Don Juan de Oñaté from Nuevo Mexico. Some Acomas had escaped that fateful Spanish attack and returned to the mesa top in 1599 to begin rebuilding. In 1620 a Royal Decree was issued establishing civil offices in each pueblo, and Acoma had its first governor appointed. Those governors met at Santo Domingo Pueblo at the All Pueblos Council, the first democratic institution in the Americas, an institution that is still functioning.
By 1680, the situation between the pueblos and the Spanish had deteriorated to the point where the Acomas were extremely willing participants in the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. After the successful Pueblo Revolt, the Spanish retreated to Mexico. Refugees from other pueblos began arriving at Acoma, fearing an eventual Spanish return and reprisals. That strained the resources of Acoma until the Spanish actually did return. Then residents of the pueblo had to make a difficult decision. Many of the refugees chose to try a peaceful solution: they relocated to the ancient Laguna area and made peace with the Spanish as soon as they appeared in the region. Acoma made peace with the Spanish soon after.
Over the next 200 years, Acoma suffered from outbreaks of smallpox and other European-introduced diseases to which they had no natural immunity. They also sided with the Spanish against raiders from the Navajo and Apache tribes. Then New Mexico changed hands a couple times, the railroads arrived and, like every other Native American pueblo, the Acoma people became dependent on inexpensive goods brought in from the outside world.
For many years the villagers were content on the mesa top and they kept advances in technology below. Now most live in villages on the valley floor where water, electricity, natural gas and other "luxuries" are easily available. While a few families still make their permanent home on the mesa top, the old pueblo is used almost exclusively for ceremonies and celebrations these days.
Historically, Acoma was known for large, thin-walled "ollas," jars used for storing food and water. With the arrival of the railroad and tourists in the 1880s, Acoma potters adapted the size, shapes and styles of their pots in order to appeal to the new buyers.
Up into the mid-1960s, most Acoma potters felt it was an inappropriate display of ego to sign their pots. Then Kenneth Chapman convinced Lucy Lewis, Jessie Garcia and Marie Z. Chino of the value of their signatures and they started signing their pieces. The 1960s is also a time when the primary Acoma white clay vein passed through a layer of widely distributed impurities, impurities that passed through the clay filtering process and showed up only during and after the firing. The problem was so bad it affected virtually every Acoma potter and every pot they made. Thankfully, by the late 1960s they had burrowed through that layer of clay and into a deeper layer that didn't have the problem.
100 West San Francisco Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501
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