Ohkay Owingeh Very Large Polished Black Dough Bowl [SOLD]

Special Value Offer: The owner has authorized a price reduction from the original price of $8500 to a new price of $7500.

The arrival of the Spaniards in the late 1500s had very little effect on pottery production at the pueblos in either shape or design, but by the 1700s, there were noticeable changes.  Still later, with the opening of the Santa Fe Trail in 1821 and the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in 1880, change became inevitable at pueblos located close to the non-Indian populations.

San Juan Pueblo, now Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, stuck to its original pottery traditions of simple undecorated utilitarian wares that were so beautiful in vessel shape and simple slipped surfaces highlighted by fire clouds.  Even today, a hundred years after the pueblo abandoned its traditional style for a more modern style to appeal to tourists and collectors, the beautiful undecorated wares of the pueblo are still capturing the eyes of collectors.

This polished black large dough bowl is from the early 20^th-century and is a standard Tewa shape from Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, deriving directly from seventeenth and eighteenth century bowls with upright sides and constricted neck.

The vessel was slipped in red clay from the pueblo and then stone-polished to a high luster. The interior of the bowl was stone polished as well. The bowl was then fired in a reduction firing, resulting in the high-burnish black finish.

The shape of the bowl is very pleasing. It flares out from the bottom to midway of the vessel body then gracefully curves inward before rising to a long and graceful neck that has a gentle concave shape. There are beautiful fire clouds on the body that are subtle because black fire clouds on a black surface do not show up too well.

This is an extraordinary bowl that needs no written accolades to speak of its beauty. It stands alone on its own merits.

Condition:  there is one small crack at the rim and some abrasion of the polished surface of the bowl

Provenance: from the collection of a Santa Fe resident

Recommended Reading:  Pueblo Pottery of the New Mexico Indians: Ever Constant, Ever Changing (A Museum of New Mexico Press Guidebook) by Betty Toulouse