6.3.24 — On Shifting Ground
How do you cover a thousand years of art in two small rooms? You proceed as if nothing has ever changed, in a Native American tradition that extends to this day.
For “Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery” at the Met, a millennium is a single collective moment. It is curated by collective, too—the Pueblo Pottery Collective of artists, poets, and scholars. Nearly sixty members select a work apiece and, in wall text, relate it to what they love. The result is gorgeous and, of course, grounded, through June 4, but not much in the way of history.
For the collective, pottery sustains a people and a tradition. It has its uses, for cooking and storage, but also its spiritual and artistic value. The show divides into four sections for utility, ancestors, elements, and connections through time and space, but do not dream of keeping them apart. One curator introduces Anthony Durand, a much admired potter with a bold, distinctive style, by quoting his grandmother, who “taught me that our pottery is made for functional use.” Even a puki, or potter’s wheel clotted with red clay, could also carry water. For his own jar, Durand thoughtfully supplies a lid.
In turn, for all those hundreds of years, pottery displays much the same patterns of broken parallels, spotted here and there with animal life. It is making and remaking a people and their beliefs. Last, it has room for an individual’s contributions, like Durand’s broad horizontals in black and gold. If one had any doubt that a work could do three or four things at once, those “elements” are the earth and water of moist clay, the fire that makes it pottery, and the air of a potter’s inspiration. Can it still, though, speak of a single community and an unbroken tradition? A year after indigenous “Water Memories,” also in the Met’s American wing, and Civil War–era black potters in the Lehman wing, I have my doubts.
The show has its ground zero in the southern half of New Mexico, but crosses borders in every direction. As for chronology, forget about it. The curators pick their favorites, but the work falls where it may. History itself gets a pass, including the brutal history of Indian wars and white displacement. For that, you will just have to begin in the present, with Jaune Quick-to-See Smith at the Whitney (and I work this together with my earlier report on Smith as a longer review and my latest upload). What so much as distinguishes the Pueblo? Even there, you are pretty much on your own.
The curators, with scholarly support from the Indian Arts Research Center of the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe and the Vilcek Foundation, supply a map. They also list nearly two dozen tribes, in both their own language and common usage. Plainly this is contested ground. Yet they stick to an upbeat narrative with a happy ending, like so much attention to diversity today. For more, one can always continue into the Diker collection, on long-term view, including pottery amid the decorative arts, often from much the very same place. You may hardly notice where either show begins or ends.
For all that, the Met does a service by introducing recent artists in context. Monica Silva, Rachel Namingha Nampeyo, Juanita Johnson, and Emilia (Emily) Lente Carpio use gentler curves like waves, for a time more concerned with a people’s place in nature. I might even guess at an evolution in time—but bear in mind that early work, after a thousand years of wear and tear, may not be as crude as it looks. Around the first European contact, glazed jars become smoother and more deeply glazed, with all the polish of colonial art. The most recent artists grow more personal. They may all but eliminate the bowl in favor of abstraction from nature, like black turtle figurines by Greg Garcia and a corrugated bowl in deep red by Helen Naranjo Shupla.
They may become more self-conscious, like Jeralyn Lujan Lucero with a seated woman beside her own tiny bowl. They may become downright whimsical as well, like a face jug by Lorencita Pino and a figurine by Felipa Trujillo, although a free-standing figure by an unknown artist dates as early as 1900. It makes sense that the curators keep citing their grandmothers, as artists and judges of art. It is not just that they set a model for working away, as women. They are also close enough to the present to belong to the curator’s experience, but far enough the past to harbor memories of their own. A loose sense of time is simultaneously a tradition.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.