Polished Red and Polychrome Hopi Pueblo Bowl [SOLD]

Garnet Pavatea was one of the best known of the non-Nampeyo family potters at Hopi First Mesa. She was an extraordinary artisan. Garnet had a long and productive career of pottery making and was a favorite of collectors of Hopi pottery. Her father was a Hopi and her mother a Tewa. She lived at the Tewa Village on First Mesa on the Hopi Reservation. She was an active potter from circa 1940 to circa 1981. She is best known and was fond of making plain red bowls and jars with triangular indentations around the rim as the sole decoration. Often, she made ladles to accompany her bowls. The Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff amassed a major collection of her work.

The exterior of this bowl is undecorated stone-polished red slip with a beautiful smooth burnish. The interior is designed with a stylized Sikyatki bird imposed over a beautiful orange slip. A black rim completes the decoration.

The bowl is in extraordinary condition. It most likely dates to the 1960s decade.

Provenance: From the estate of Transcendental artist Florence Pierce of Albuquerque who passed away in 2007 at the age of 89. She was best known for luminescent paintings made of pigmented resins on reflective surfaces. Her interest in abstraction began in the 1930s when she was an associate of the Transcendental Painting Group. The New York Times called her “the doyenne of abstract art in the Southwest” following her art exhibit in New York City in 2006.