For the month of June, we’re going to do something a little bit different. This space will feature a series within a series, with each Tuesday Indigenous Arts post devoted to a different aspect of the same topic. It’s an opportunity to explore one subject in some depth, giving due attention to its constituent elements.
June is planting season here, a time to get back to the earth in very real ways. By the end of the week, I will have my hands deep in the soil, planting the Three Sisters and an assortment of other fruits, vegetables, herbs, and flowers, including some medicine plants. We have already been through one round of irrigation this season, and we do it the old way, ditches dug by hand and the water routed through them via hand-turned earthen dams. The fields of hay are nearly ready to be dropped and baled, at which point it will be time to irrigate once again.
Heading into the summer, the old village likewise gets down to earth in other ways: It’s mudding season, the time when the people ready themselves to make repairs to their homes, and collectively, to the church. By summer’s end, the dusty earth of the plaza will bear daily witness to the freshening of homes that have stood a thousand years and more, to the building of and stacking of clay bricks mortared together by hand, interior walls and fireplaces shored up in advance of winter snows and exterior and perimeter walls floated and refaced, expert masons and plasterers mending cracks and seams and turning their sunlit surfaces once again to something out of the mythical Cities of Gold.
With that in mind, this month seems the right time to explore the earthen art of Taos Pueblo, the art form for which it is perhaps best known.
The most obvious form, of course, is the Pueblo’s iconic pottery, and that will naturally be our primary focus, with each week’s post dedicated to a different category of classic pottery styles.Our final week, however, will be devoted to other artistic uses of Taos Pueblo’s traditional micaceous clay, including figurative works. [Note: This months’ series will not include the pottery of other Pueblos, nor of other styles such as redware, blackware, polychrome, and other pottery media. Some of Taos Pueblo’s potters work in such styles, but this month is devoted specifically to that which is made with traditional micaceous clay. As usual, we’ll coil a little additional background throughout each post, adding history and more practical elements before each post is fired, so to speak.]
We begin this month with a look at perhaps the most basic use of pottery: that which feeds the body, and in so doing, feeds the spirit. Today’s discussion will also turn to some of those works which feed the spirits, plural.
At the outset, however, we should note that the Pueblo’s traditional clay feeds the people in another way beyond its use in pottery:
It is the material of which hornos, the traditional domed ovens, are made.
Horno is the Spanish word for oven; like so much found in so many of our cultures, many traditional words often were originally imposed by outsiders — even the word pueblo itself. It has fallen into the ease of common usage now (although the people of Taos Pueblo maintain their own vibrant, fully living language that contains its own words for such things, it is a language restricted to the people themselves, and so “outside” words in common languages are convenient for many reasons). Such ovens are still used routinely; they play an integral role in the cooking for ceremonial occasions and fest days, but some families also continue to use them for everyday baking of Pueblo bread, cookies, fruit pies (which are small turnover-like filled pies), and other items.
Like the walls of the old village homes, of the church and the courtyard and the perimeter walls, the hornos are constructed of the Pueblo’s own warm red-gold clay. it does contain trace amounts of mica which is what causes the walls to shine so brilliantly in the sunlight. But the key word is “trace”: The clay used in Taos Pueblo’s pottery (and that of their “sister” Pueblo, Picuris, some forty minutes distant) contains a much higher concentration of mica, making it shimmer in dry powdery form or when wet; once fired, it’s positively radiant. It comes from a local pit on tribal land whose use is restricted solely to enrolled members of the two Pueblos. There are other deposits of micaceous clay around the country, and such clay from those sources is now sold on the open [non-Native] market. It can even be bought in pre-processed form, rolled into thin sheets ready for use, so that no coiling is necessary. It’s popular among non-Native artists ripping off traditional Pueblo styles that were built upon a millennium of history and traditional infused with ancestral skill and knowledge, so unless you’re buying from an actual tribal member, it’s best to establish what it is you’re actually getting for your money.
But before we get to the actual cooking, much less the feeding, micaceous pottery puts in an appearance at a very fundamental stage: Planting.
One pottery item that has long been in use here is what is known as a seed pot. They appear in other cultures, too, but in this place, they are made the old way, out the Pueblo’s own micaceous clay. It makes them seem uniquely connected to the earth to which they return new life each season.
Seed pots tend to be small in size; some are literal miniatures. The one pictured here, by Taos Pueblo artist Benito Romero, is not that diminutive — at three inches high by some three and a half inches across at its widest point, it’s perhaps average in size for such works. It assumes classic form, almost but not quite round when viewed from the side, perfectly round when viewed from the top, and centered by a tiny round opening, as shown below.
The opening is just large enough to permit seeds to be deposited into it, where they can be stored for extended periods, including through the winter months. When planting seaso
n rolls around, the process is made exceedingly simple (for certain types of crops): Once holes, mounds, or furrows are made in the soil, the planter need only turn the seed pot upside down at th
e proper angle, and in the proper proportion, shake out the seeds straight into the earth.
Wings has created similar seed pots of sterling silver, miniatures wrought int he traditional shape and style, with stampwork in the sort of patterns one might find incised onto or excised from the surface of their real-life clay counterparts.
When it comes to the traditional preparation and serving of food, however, most micaceous pottery assumes one of a few basic forms. And here, we detour for a moment to visit an issue of terminology: Throughout this post, I will most often uses the terms “pottery,” or “pot,” but in fact, there are some pottery styles that are technically considered pots, and others that are considered bowls — and still others that qualify as neither, such as ollas (water jars), wedding vases, and spirit plates. Of the last three, we’ll address only spirit plates (and spirit bowls) today, and only briefly. The ollas and wedding vases will put in their appearance in the weeks to come. Most of our focus today will be on pots and bowls, including the sometimes vague aesthetic distinctions between the two.
There is an old school of thought that says, “pots are for cooking; bowls are for serving,” but as is usually the case with pretty much anything, it’s not that simple. “Pot” has become the common parlance for almost any form of clayware, while “bowl” remains mostly confined to items that are, well, bowl-shaped. The beautiful fluted work at the top of this post, one by master potter Angie Yazzie, certainly qualifies as a “pot,” with its round lower bowl flowing upward into high walls and extending outward at the mouth into its beautifully fluted lip. This was a large work, but not gigantic; she has a positively enormous version in a similar design currently on display in a local gallery in town.
To be technical about it, a pot may look like this:
This corn pot by Wings’s aunt, Juanita Suazo DuBray, has the rounded lower portion and flat bottom of a bowl, but its sides extend upward, high above the bowl-like base. In this instance, it’s not a work that would be used either for cooking or serving; it’s a collectible work of art, fashioned in the style of traditional pots but intended to adorn a shelf or mantel. If it were to be put to practical use, however, its style dictates that it would likely fall into the last category of items we’ll discuss today, those that feed the spirits.
By way of contrast, look at the work on the right in the next photo:
These two works are miniatures, but they are wrought in the classic style of Taos Pueblo’s most traditional potters. The item on the left is less bowl than plate, and one likely with a particular purpose that we’ll get to in a few moments. The one on the right? It’s a bowl.
Now, look at the two works pictured immediately below:
Now, here’s where it gets tricky. The one on the left, with the scalloped rim? A pot, most definitely. But it was large piece, with a wide mouth and fluted lip, one that clearly could be used as a bowl. So which is it? Well, it’s both.
But what about the one on the right? Ah, this one’s even trickier. It’s a bowl, certainly. It also qualifies as a pot in the broadest sense of the term. But look at the mouth of the bowl: It flows into a ewer-like spout, suitable for pouring out water. So how would one classify this work? It’s not technically an olla, because it’s not a jar, but it bears definite olla-like properties. If pressed to provide a category label, I’d say that it falls into all three — pot, bowl, and olla — and if forced to give the style a name, “water bowl” would probably suffice.
When it comes to cookware, micaceous pottery has a long and time-honored history of service — and it comes in a broad range of sizes. When feeds and feast days dictate that any one group of cooks may be feeding dozens, scores, or even hundreds of people, the cooking dishes must accommodate the need to prepare food in large quantities.
This bowl was one such example, although this particular work was never intended for practical use. It’s another masterpiece by Angie Yazzie, and it represents a departure from my earlier parenthetical note to the effect that we would not discussing blackware today. This enormous pot is indeed blackware, but it is micaceous blackware, a specialized variant found relatively rarely, and then most often among the potters of Taos Pueblo.
Ordinary blackware begins as red clay also, but of the matte variety, without the flecks of mica infused throughout traditional Taos Pueblo clay. When fired, depending on the temperature of the fire, the type and closeness of the cover, and the duration of the firing process, the color grows increasingly dark and the finish increasingly glossy. Some of the blackware from Santa Clara and San Ildefonso Pueblos bears the look of molten jet. Micaceous blackware, on the other hand, tends toward a matte finish because of the mineralogical composition of the clay. Once fired, it appears black, certainly, but it retains the telltale shimmer of the mica, giving it a hauntingly beautiful appearance.
This particular piece was, as I said above, enormous, both in size and in significance. It was a work of art, not meant to be put to use boiling water or cooking chile, but serve as an artistic embodiment of culture and tradition. It took some time, but it found its home some six or seven years ago.
For artistic purposes, such large, bold works tend to be unusual among Taos Pueblo potters
. More often, they tend to specialize in smaller pieces, works of modest to miniature sizes. Angie is unusual in that she deliberately takes a big, bold approach to her work. Even her small pieces as spectacular, as we shall see in a few moments.
More characteristic of collectible forms of Taos 
Pueblo cookware are upright pots: bean pots and other covered dishes. They are popular with traditional Picuris potters, as well, such as late Anthony Duran who crafted one of the bean pots shown here. The other was by a Taos Pueblo artisan whose name is lost to the mists of memory and time, or at least to my old database on an old laptop. Both are made of traditional micaceous clay in the classic short squat shape characteristic to bean pots. The one at left featured a fluted rim and small handles pulled organically from the coiled body of the pot, and was topped by a plain cover with a classic knob handle. The one at right was a bit fancier, with a studded pattern around the perimeter of the bowl, bits of clay pulled at intervals from the body; its lid featured a loop-like handle for ease of use.
I mentioned above that Taos Pueblo artisans often produce miniature versions of full-sized, fully functional pots. Some are simply small, like this classic round pot by the late Wilson Appa:
Others fully qualify as miniatures, such as these diminutive archetypal micaceous pots by Wings’s cousin, Bernadette Track:
Still other are made by Wings himself, rendered in his own medium of sterling silver, small tributes to the open bowls of his people’s tradition:
Like the sterling silver seed pot depicted above, his miniature bowls are fashioned in the traditional shape and style, then stamped with equally traditional designs that tell their own story.
I alluded earlier, on a couple of occasions, to the notion that Pueblo pottery is not solely about feeding the body, nor even the human spirit: I referred specifically to spirits, plural. I meant by that word exactly what it implies, the spirit beings who form a part of the Pueblo cosmology and spiritual tradition. And I’m going to return once again to one of the photos I posted earlier, as an illustration of what this next section denotes:
The earlier appearance of this image focused on the miniature bowl on the right. For the moment, however, I want to discuss the work on the left.
If you look at the fluted piece from the side, it appears slightly bowl-like; it could even been classified in the broader category of (miniature) pot. But when you look at from above, it becomes clear just how shallow its depth truly is. It’s almost a plate.
And therein lies another traditional use for micaceous pottery, on the involves feeding: spirit plates and spirit bowls, designed to feed those beings who dwell (for the most part, at least) in the world beyond this one, yet who are also able to affect our lives in this world, and whose blessings and favor we seek.
I’ve written about this tradition here before. It’s one that sometimes accompanies the use of fetishes: At Zuni, for example, fetish sets that include the representatives of what, in their culture, are the Six Sacred Directions are often set out with a spirit bowl or spirit plate of cornmeal in the appropriate colors, to feed the spirits that the fetishes represent.
Here, we regularly set aside a small bowl or plate in which to put a minute portion of each item at a meal, including water, coffee, tea, or whatever is on the table to drink. The food is then offered to Spirit (and to the lesser beings, including ancestor spirits) as an expression of gratitude and thanksgiving, as acknowledgment and token of honor and respect.
There are other contexts for using such bowls and plates, as well generally involving offerings of a sort. Several years ago, Angie Yazzie created a beautiful spirit plate, larger then a dinner plate, and rather platter-like in shape, slightly oblong, with lightly raised edges. She specializes in pottery with exceptionally fine, thin walls, and this was, necessarily, slightly thicker than some of her usual work, but an ethereal quality glowed from its pale shimmering surface.
She has also created what might be termed spirit bowls. In 2008, she crafted a pair that, while not matched, were certainly complementary: Both were wrought in an ancient pattern honoring the Four Sacred Directions, one a pot with a lip that curled over the top, the mouth small and cut out into the same kiva steps pattern that you see above, with the spokes pointing to the four directions. It sold first.
The complementary bowl was the own shown here: the same kiva steps pattern used to create spokes at each of the Four Directions, but rather than excised as negative space, as with the other one, in this instance they formed the walls of the bowl itself. This one was a bit more shallow, as well, as you can see in the image below:
It was by no means a plate, but its openness hinted at plate-like qualities. It also hinted at a possible identity as a spirit bowl, one designed to honor openly those beings whose favor we seek.
Both this bowl and its companion piece were also stellar examples of Angie’s ability to create clayware that is nearly paper-thin. Her works are fragile, as pottery tends to be, but despite their delicacy, they are bold works, strong and solid, full of substance and spirit.
Perhaps the most wnderful aspect of the work of Taos Pueblo potters, however, is their ability to take the things of the earth, a uniquely beautiful earth sacred to the people of this place, and turn them into fully functional, inspired and inspirited works of art: Art that feeds the body and spirit, and the spirits, too.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2016; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
