For two thousand years, the Hopi people have lived a desert lifestyle.  They depend on water for their daily needs and for their plants, but water is in short supply.  Over the years they have developed a system whereby they can pretty accurately forecast the weather, but that is not always sufficient for their needs.  In order to ensure delivery of water when needed, they developed a pattern by which they ask for help from the supernatural forces that they believe control nature. 

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Assigning a date to Zuni Pueblo historic pottery is facilitated by the very large number of Zuni vessels collected for the Bureau of American Ethnology between 1879 and 1885, and by those collected for the American Museum of Natural History between 1899 and 1912.

Sometime before 1870, potters began to paint their vessels' underbodies and the interiors of their necks black.  In early cases, black was applied over the interior's red neck paint.  In those vessels, the red is faintly visible through the black.  Of course, a change of this nature did not occur overnight but may have occurred over several decades.  It is believed that the change on the neck interior was completed by 1865.  It was not until around 1900 that the underbody caught up with the neck.

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Henry Morgan is listed as a Navajo silversmith in jewelry books as having been producing since 1991, but there is no other biographical information. This wonderful pin was made in the cast method, then the three oval and domed turquoise cabs were attached in silver bezels.

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R. Chee is listed in jewelry books as a smith for State Line Indian Jewelry.  He is from Window Rock, AZ.  His jewelry is stamped R.CHEE.  There is no first name given in the documentation.

The bracelet was made in the cast form with the addition of the lined shell-shape elements attached on top near the turquoise and the two silver dots adjacent to the shells. 

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Dorothy Herrera formed a very realistic storyteller figurine of a mama bear with her cub.  The multitasking female bear has also captured a fish in her left paw!  Her single cub is riding on her back.  He is watching her intently - learning how to be a successful hunter. 

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Cochiti Pueblo potter Dorothy Herrera is the granddaughter of Laurencita Herrera and daughter of Mary Frances Herrera.  She has been making pottery, mostly storytellers, since the 1980s. This seated female storyteller figurine is dressed in the traditional pueblo dress that is over one shoulder and under the other one. 

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Yucatecas en el Parque is a stone lithograph executed in 6 colors.  It was printed by Atelier Mourlot in Paris, France.  The publisher was Brewster Editions, New York, New York.  It was printed on handmade Arches Rives & Japan paper.  There were 150 copies in the edition, and this is #32/150.

Francisco Zuñiga was born in Costa Rica at the end of the year 1912.  As an early teenager, he assisted his father at his wood sculpture workshop where carving religious figures predominated.  He began using oil paints at age 14, using his brother and sister as models.  Two years later, he carved his first stone sculpture and it won Second Prize in the National Fine Arts Exhibition.  He continued winning prizes in that competition for successive years.

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Manuel Bob Chavez (1915-2003) Ow-u-Te-Wa - Echo of a Song, who was born in 1915, painted in the traditional manner, then turned to a style all his own.  This painting of a Cochiti "Flute Dancer" is of the traditional style and was painted when the artist was 25 years old.  Generally, background materials were not included by Santa Fe Indian School students but Chavez included a pueblo building and corn plants in the field as background although they are a minor aspect of the painting.

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This excellent rendition of a pair of horses galloping toward some unknown destination documents well just how talented Romando Vigil (1902-1978) Tse Ye Mu - Falling Cloud was as an artist.  He was painting in the early 1900s at San Ildefonso and is considered one of the early self-taught artist from there.  He was a leader within the San Ildefonso Watercolor Movement, a movement that caught fire during 1915 to 1917. It fostered an art form unmatched in the cultural history of the world. These men portrayed tribal culture and local wildlife, attaining a flat decorative character, absent of backgrounds and foregrounds, and free of traditional perspective, with an unerring color sense. 

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When Helen Cordero created what today is known as the Storyteller figurine, she reinvented a longstanding but inactive Cochiti Pueblo tradition of figurative pottery, a tradition dating back to the 1880s.  She ignited a revolution in pueblo ceramic figurative pottery comparable to the revivals by Nampeyo of the Tewa village at Hopi and by Maria Martinez of the Tewa village of San Ildefonso.

Helen Cordero started making pottery figurines in the late 1950s, mostly small frogs, birds, animals and small people.  When she exhibited her pottery at a Santo Domingo feast day, folk art collector Alexander Girard bought all of the little people figures.  He asked her to make more people figurines and bring them to him.  He then asked her to make a larger seated figure with children.  It was then that Helen began visioning her grandfather, Santiago Quintana, who was a good storyteller and grandchildren were always around him.

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This bracelet was formed from ingot silver. It has a split shank, over which are three medallions of stamped silver featuring a beautiful green turquoise stone on each. The ends of the Southwest Indian Jewelry bracelet are profusely stamped. The bracelet dates to the 1930s.

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Jan Loco is a member of the Warm Springs Apache tribe.  She began making jewelry in 1988. She has developed a method of making jewelry without the use of hand tools. After cutting the silver to the desired shape (with heavy-duty poultry scissors or something similar), she hammers it with a specially selected rock until she achieves the texture she desires. This is a laborious task, but she feels it honors her ancestry to use items of nature rather than power tools. 

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There were probably more bowls made in New Mexico Pueblos than there were jars.  Very large bowls, called dough bowls,  were used for preparing bread dough; medium-size ones were used for preparation of tortilla dough, serving food at the table or for storage and even overturned as a lid for covering jars; the smallest bowls were used for daily meals.

This historic bowl is a medium-size one, and that shows no wear from use.  It was probably purchased when made and was probably made in the 1930s or so.  The rim of the bowl rises up from a slight indention just below.  The design is a sinusoidal wave encircling the vessel.

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This is an exceptional small Zia Pueblo olla that dates to the early 20th Century (1910-1920). It is coil formed from native clay with the addition of crushed basaltic lava as a tempering agent.

The underbody is stone-polished, with the ubiquitous (until 1930) red banding at the top of the under body. The neck interior is red-slipped to the upper shoulder, just below the scalloped rim, which shows evidence of having been painted in black mineral pigments. The upper body is white-slipped and stone-polished, with black and red mineral pigment design motifs. The underbody is concave.

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This is an exceptionally deep historic dough bowl from Zia Pueblo, created most probably in the 1920s. This fine piece was coil-formed in native clay with the addition of crushed basaltic temper. The underbody was stone-polished over the bare paste in a warm brick red color. A narrow red band was wiped on as a dividing line between the bare paste underbody and the decorated upper body. The design field was slipped in a creamy white slip on which was prominently displayed the traditional design seen on almost every Zia dough bowl. 

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Most often the design is the determining factor of the desirability of a jar by a collector.  Occasionally, however, it is the vessel shape that first captures one's eye.  This is generally true when the design is not overwhelming and obliterating the vessel shape.

This early Santo Domingo jar has a very minimal design with the cream slip predominating.  These design choices make the vessel's shape seem even more captivating.  The jar rises up from the base in an outward swell to the mid-point, and then curves in to a sharp shoulder.  It then reverses to a concave curve that ends with a flared rim.  It is the voluminous body, high shoulder and restricted neck that combine to make this an amazingly beautiful vessel. 

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Probably the most significant Katsina doll ever made was a Buffalo Katsina doll, dating to 1885. It was stolen from Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos, New Mexico, a number of years ago.  Some would agree that it is the most significant Native American object ever made.  To the Zuni, Katsina dolls are not considered tourist objects and Zuni elders disapprove of them being sold.  There are a number of doll carvers at Zuni today who do make them for sale, so they have not been forced to discontinue doing so.

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This San Ildefonso Pueblo plate is signed Maria & Santana, the later signature, indicating that it was made after 1956. Maria made the plate and Santana decorated it with eagle feathers, one of the favorite designs of Julian which was continued both by her other son, Popovi Da, and Santana. 

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Maria and Julian had four sons: Adam, John, Popovi Da, and Philip.  Adam's wife was Santana and it was she who worked with Maria following the death of Julian in 1943.  There are two periods of pottery that were collaborated by Maria and Santana.  The earlier ones were signed Marie + Santana and that period lasted from Julian's death in 1943 until 1956, at which time Popovi Da replaced Santana and helped his mom.  Maria did not immediately stop working with Santana when she began working with Popovi but did continue on and off for a few more years.  Those pieces are signed Maria + Santana. 

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Michael Hawley, formerly of Scottsdale, Arizona, who passed away in 2012, was the only living potter creating true Sikyatki Polychrome pottery vessels in the same manner as they were originally made from the 14th through the 17th centuries. Hawley called this pottery Chakoptewa Polychrome-Chakoptewa being his adopted Hopi name.

Hawley used only hand-ground clay dug on Antelope Mesa on the Hopi Reservation and he hand coiled, shaped, polished, painted and coal fired each of these pots in a firing pit he constructed himself. All of his pigments were made by hand from minerals and plants indigenous to the Hopi Mesas and each of his painted designs was original and within the Sikyatki design tradition.

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