On the ground | Art

The name is descriptive but conveys a local idea of ​​the importance of the place. The full name of La Villa Real de la Santa Fe is in memory of a saint. But the O’gah’poh geh Owingeh call it for what it is there: a place that offers its gifts from the Earth, whether they occur naturally at White Shell Water Place or through trade. The Navajo call it Yootó, a combination of the words for bead and water place.

But one gift is central to the region’s ceramic traditions: the land itself. And it is such a prominent art form in the local Southwest, its presence on the landscape is fundamental to local expression. This is in the shared family and community history of jeweler Monica Silva Lovato (San Felipe, Ceva/Santo Domingo). It is in the landscape of her dreams.

One night, Silva Lovato dreamed that she was making pottery under the instruction of an elder she did not know. Captivated by the design of the pot she was making, she tried to recreate it in real life. But when she was asked to select an object from the Vilcek Foundation’s (21 E. 70th St., New York, NY, 212-472-2500, vilcek.org) collection of native ceramics for the groundbreaking exhibition Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Potterywhat she found amazed her.

Viewing items from the photo collection at the Center for the Study of Indian Arts at the School for Advanced Study (660 Garcia St., 505-954-7200, sarweb.org), an exhibition co-sponsor with the Vilcek Foundation, she saw her dream design to stares up at her.

“I said, ‘This one, that’s my design,'” Silva Lovato wrote in the exhibition’s upcoming catalog, Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery (Merrell Publishing, 288 pages, 2 September 2022). “The picture made my choice for me. I turned the photo over and saw a handwritten annotation: “Attributed to Monica Silva by Robert Tenorio.” Monica Silva, my great grandmother. That was the moment my dream made sense to me.

The level of personal connections and local cultural knowledge is the driving force Grounded in claywhich can be seen at the Museum of Indian Art and Culture (until 29 May 2023).

This is not the first community-curated exhibition to grace a museum gallery, but it reflects the application of IARC’s collaborative Cooperation guidelines, a resource for museums and local communities (which have a historically fraught relationship) working together on collaborative projects. The guidelines were first published in 2017 and a second version followed in 2019.

“Each person was responsible for choosing their own pieces, so they’re very invested in the ones they’ve chosen,” says IARC director Elysia Poon. “They came together and through all their stories tried to identify common threads. This somewhat determined the themes of the exhibition.”

The exhibition draws from the Vilcek Foundation’s collection of 45 historical vessels and the SAR’s collection of more than 12,000 ceramics. More than 60 representatives from 21 tribal communities (an informal group called the Pueblo Pottery Collective), including all 19 Pueblos in New Mexico along the Rio Grande, selected more than 100 objects for the exhibition, sharing their knowledge of aesthetics, the transmission of cultural knowledge across generations and their personal narratives. The representatives were selected through SAR’s familiarity with them from cultural events, markets and through previous collaborative projects and artist residencies completed at SAR. It grew organically, Poon says, as members of the fledgling collection made additional referrals to SAR. The objects were selected from photographs in the Wilczek collection and on site at the Wilczek Foundation and at the SAR.

In New York, for example, Brian Vallo (Acoma) made personal contact with an Acoma storage jar from about 1880.

“In the ancestral lands of the Lenape, now Manhattan, I was blessed with the opportunity to hold and reconnect with this beautiful object of my ancestry,” Vallo wrote in the exhibition catalog. “Its majestic character and design mesmerized and grounded me. Privileged to hold the jar, to connect with its form and construction, I spoke to him in my Acoma language: I introduced myself, shared words of admiration, and thanked for the opportunity to meet again.’

The Center for the Study of Indian Arts is at the forefront of a national effort to develop institutional guidelines for culturally sensitive materials and indigenous communities.

The program was launched under the leadership of Cynthia Chavez Lamar, who was director of the Center for the Study of Indian Arts from 2007 to 2014 and is now director of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC

Perhaps less by accident than by design, Grounded in clay opened at MIAC just weeks after the reopening of the museum’s main exhibition, Here, Now and Alwaysanother community curation project.

“Here, Now and Always, especially in its initial iteration, was one of the early exhibits that really called for a community voice,” Poon says. “The new installation follows that. The Cooperation guidelines it didn’t just come out of the DAB. It is indeed an accumulation of many years of work by many institutions, including the Museum of Indian Art and Culture. The guidelines synthesize all the work into a manageable document.”

Grounded in clay is a traveling exhibition, and its next stop is among the nation’s top art institutions: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 5th Ave., New York, NY, 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org).

“It’s really exciting to have such a major show traveling to these major fine art institutions, with so many brilliant voices associated with the exhibition,” Poon says. “It is such a blessing and a privilege for SAR to be able to help facilitate this.”

In New York, the exhibition will be divided into two locations: the Met and the Vilcek Foundation, where it will open on July 13, 2023 (until June 4, 2024). It will then travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and remain on display from October 27, 2024 to January 19, 2025 before heading to the St. Louis Art Museum from March 9, 2025 to June 1 2025.

“The Vilcek Foundation was looking for a partner to create a ceramic exhibit, and we happened to be approaching our 100th anniversary,” Poon says. “So it seemed like a very likely partnership. We could have created a show with just our pieces, but we wanted to give members of the community an opportunity to bring some of these pieces home, even if just for a little while, and for the family and community to see these pieces that have resided in New York.”

And the stories behind the pots, why they were chosen and what they represent will reach a much wider audience.

“It was amazing to see the stories of some of the pieces come to light,” Poon says. “For example, if you look at Max Early’s (Laguna) selection, it’s something that he’s been tracking all over the place—different museums, different places—and when we started this project, he finally had the opportunity to bring that work and be close to that piece.

An early choice Laguna/Acoma dough bowl from about 1830-1850.

“I have met the dough bowl four times,” he wrote in the exhibition catalogue. “In the early 1990s, I often visited the bowl at a gallery in Santa Fe. It sold, changed hands and was listed for sale at another gallery where I spotted it again. After it was sold, I often wondered where it went. Then, in 2006, I walked into the Denver Public Library and happened upon my favorite treasure on display.”

Fifteen years later, Earley, who was fascinated by the boldness and simplicity of the design, noticed the same bowl in the Vilcek Foundation catalog.

“My eyes widened as I felt the bowl calling to me,” he wrote, adding later in his essay, “I felt as if I had found a long-lost relative living in New York, and we were reacquainted. I whispered a greeting in my language to Ceres and asked the spirit of the bowl to tell me more about himself. For the Pueblo people, their pottery lives on as individual creatures of creation.

And with that perspective in mind hobby presents a selection of objects from the exhibition, not simply as objects of clay, but as beings of spirit and soul.