Original Painting “Mosquito Man” from Pottery Mound Mural by Pablita Velarde [R]

Pablita Velarde of Santa Clara Pueblo was best known for her earth paintings, where she used mineral and rock elements, which she would grind using a traditional metate and mano until the result was a powdery substance from which she made her paints. This is an earth painting using the mineral paints. It depicts a mural from the ancient Puebloan ruins at Pottery Mound.

Ancestral Puebloan peoples inhabited the Pottery Mound site on New Mexico's Rio Puerco (river) from the late fourteenth to the late fifteenth centuries. Archaeologist Frank C. Hibben began excavating Pottery Mound fifty years ago, when archaeologists were paying relatively little attention to Ancestral Pueblo sites.

Hibben discovered an abundance of pottery styles and layers of murals in eleven kivas that are a magnificent archive of religious iconography of the period. In the late 1970s, Pablita reproduced some of the mural paintings from Pottery Mound. This is one of them.