Acoma Pueblo Black-on-white Chino Jar [SOLD]

Marie Zieu Chino was born at Acoma Pueblo in 1907.  She was certainly one of the Acoma potters who made particularly important contributions to the art of pottery making in the period following World War II. Chino was making Southwest Indian pottery as early as the 1920s.

She was known to be a patient and generous teacher.  When teaching she would first allow her students to fill in the lines. When she thought students ready, she would let them paint the whole pot.  Many of her students have gone on to become prize winning potters themselves.  She won her first award at Indian Market when she was only 15 years old.  Some of her pieces were among the prizewinners at the first Southwest Indian Fair (predecessor to Santa Fe's Indian Market) in 1922.

Chino is considered one of the significant ceramicists at Acoma and was the matriarch of a very talented family of potters. She is best known for her black-on-white pottery.  Along with Lucy Lewis and Sarah Garcia she led the revival of the ancient pottery forms of the ancestral pueblo potters.   She was one of the women who was inspirational in the movement to revive the use of ancient Mimbres designs on contemporary Acoma pottery.

This jar could be defined as displaying a growing and blossoming yucca plant.  That may or may not have been the intent of the potter but one is free to interpret pottery designs to one’s own ideas.  The design was executed in the finest detail.  The fine lines are straight and parallel and the filled in black areas are dark and strong in color.  The jar displays the signature of the potter.

Condition: original condition

Recommended Reading:  Acoma & Laguna Pottery by Rick Dillingham.  This book is currently not available from Adobe Gallery

Provenance: from the collection of a gentleman from Albuquerque