13 Artistic Ollas

“The American Indian race possesses an innate talent in the fine and applied arts. The Indian is a born artist; possessing a capacity for discipline and careful work, and a fine sense of line and rhythm, which seems to be inherent in the Mongoloid peoples. He has evolved for himself during many thousand years a form and content peculiarly his own. We white Americans have been painfully slow to realize the Indian’s value to us and to the world as an independent artist, although his work has already won recognition abroad.

“Our museums have collected Indian manufactures with scientific intent, placing as it were, the choice vase and the homely cooking pot side by side. Bound by necessity of giving a whole picture they have not been able to set forth their many beautiful specimens in an advantageous manner.

“Here, where we have a history documented over several thousand years, we can see how continuously the Indian improved, changed, revived old types, hit upon new and radical departures. The genius of individuals was evidently at work, even as in our own day Nampeyo of Hano and Maria of San Ildefonso have revolutionized pottery making in their respective villages.

“The modern Pueblo potter has at her disposal one of the richest and most complete stores of design elements in the whole world. There is hardly anything from a Greek wave through a Norman dog-tooth to a Modernist abstraction of a leaf that one cannot fine.

“Realism is not uncommon, animals and plants being slightly conventionalized, or shown with accuracy and charm, combined with designs which may or may not carry an appropriate symbolic meaning.

“From the pottery one sees the trail leading directly to the modern Pueblo painters. In pictures and in pottery, one is faced by the problem of symbolism, how much is meant to be interpreted, how much pure esthetic design. The answer probably is that it’s all one. Potter and artist draw their spiritual sustenance from their tribal life, and that life is all a design, a dance and a ceremonial, from birth to death, and through all the ramifications of daily life; it is a whole, individuals are part of a pattern. The deer and the rain designs and the unit derived from a butterfly, are used on jars and pictures, they are set deep in the life of the artists, they appear in other forms, still patterned and controlled, in the dances. Of course, they are conscious of their symbols, but their whole life is charged with symbols, from them, inevitably they draw their esthetic patterns; the significance is quite different from what it would be for us.”
Excerpted from Introduction to American Indian Art: The Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts, Inc. To Accompany the First Exhibition of American Indian Art Selected Entirely with Consideration of Esthetic Value, by John Sloan & Oliver LaFarge. 1931.