Hopi Prayer Meal Dish with Hopi Maiden [SOLD]

Nellie Nampeyo was one of three daughters of Nampeyo and Lesso.  She was between the oldest daughter, Annie, and the youngest, Fannie.  She too was a potter and she lived to be 82 years old.  Nellie was taken to the Grand Canyon, when just a child, when her mother was convinced to spend the summer there at the newly constructed "Hopi House" built by the Fred Harvey Company.  Nampeyo was there to demonstrate pottery making for tourists but the whole family was intended to show the manner in which the Hopi lived.

In 1910, the business community in Chicago sponsored a United States Land and Irrigation Exposition in the Chicago Coliseum to draw attention to modern machinery as contrasted to what was considered primitive techniques of native cultures.  Ever aware of an opportunity to lure travelers to the southwest, the Santa Fe Railway commissioned a brown stucco pueblo style house on-site to be inhabited by Indians from Hopi.  Of course, Nampeyo was requested to represent the Hopi as the pottery maker, and her daughter Nellie, who was about 16 at the time, accompanied her parents on the Santa Fe train to Chicago.  Nellie was perhaps one of the very few young Hopi who had spent a summer at the Grand Canyon and ridden a train to Chicago.

This dish, showing a Hopi unmarried maiden holding a bowl, was probably made by Nellie as a tourist item.  Items like this were used by Hopi for holding sacred corn meal used for home ceremonies, particularly at daily sunrise, but there was no restrictions on making them for sale.  The Nampeyo family of potters was particularly important to traders like Thomas Keam and companies like the Fred Harvey Company for supplying items for sale to tourists at the Grand Canyon and other frequently visited tourist outlets.

This dish is particularly charming because of the Hopi maiden and her traditional Hopi hair style. It is signed with the name Nellie Nampeyo on the underside.  It is difficult to provide a date of when it was made but probably between 1950 and 1975 is a likely choice.  I believe it is unusual to find a black-on-red item by Nellie.  Mostly, her work was Polychrome.

Condition: very good condition

Provenance: this Hopi Prayer Meal Dish with Hopi Maiden is from an individual in Santa Fe

Recommended Reading:  Nampeyo and Her Pottery by Barbara Kramer

Above, left, photo courtesy of Rick Dillingham, Fourteen Families In Pueblo Pottery.