A visit to Acoma Pueblo

[tecpatl]

Originally Posted by catman

I would love to visit there. I've seen some of the Acoma pottery for sale, and it is beautiful. I don't much think I'll take the trail, though. Looks treacherous.

By all means, buy and collect some of the beautiful Acoma pottery.
But know the difference between greenware and hand made pottery.

Hand made is formed of coils that are pinched and pulled up into the desired shape, then scraped and sometimes sanded to make it smooth before decorating and firing. Normally you can still feel or see some fingertip impressions on the inside of the pot. Potters frequently leave this as a sign of hand forming.
Acoma is known for very thin, hard fired whitish pottery with fine line designs, and the best of it is expensive and rightly so. This is the 100% handmade and the work is hard and time consuming.

Inexpensive pottery (Greenware, as it's known) is made by casting slip into a mold, letting it dry and painting before firing. It's generally not as thin as handmade, and very often (but NOT always) shows a mold line where the two parts of the mold joined together. The hand painted decoration can be very beautiful and of high quality, but the piece should not cost anywhere near what a handbuilt pot costs. It's partly manufactured, which is efficient, so the price should reflect that.

Buy and enjoy whatever your wallet can accomodate, and support Acoma's fine craftspeople, but pay attention to what you buy so you know you're getting your money's worth. A reputable source will disclose that a pot is greenware and the price should be a third (more or less) of handmade for smallish cabinet pots.
Large (harder to make) handmade pots are far, far more expensive than greenware, maybe 4 to 8 times (or more) as much as the greenware.
This large, 19th century Olla (water pot) would be priced in 5 figures.




























This one too




Hand coiled, hand painted, a beautiful pot, 9 " tall, around 375.00 retail




Greenware..very pretty, but less than 100 bucks for 9 inch tall pot

[Mike Horrell]

Tecpatl is 100% correct in everything he just said and to their credit, every
artisan we spoke to at Acoma made the coil / greenware distinction absolutely
clear. They are proud of their work and the traditions behind it so I think the
only way you could buy greenware and think it was coil was if you just plain,
out and out didn't listen.

Unfortunately, no photographs are allowed of the pottery so you'll have to
take our word for just how exquisite some of it is.

[jaxart]

Originally Posted by Mike Horrell

Tecpatl is 100% correct in everything he just said and to their credit, every
artisan we spoke to at Acoma made the coil / greenware distinction absolutely
clear.

Do they ever use pottery wheels for the bowl making?
Also, do they fire the pottery in "traditional" kilns or contemporary gas/electric fired ones?

[Mike Horrell]

Originally Posted by jaxart

Do they ever use pottery wheels for the bowl making?
Also, do they fire the pottery in "traditional" kilns or contemporary gas/electric fired ones?

I'm not sure. That may vary from artist to artist and definitely from object to object
as not all the pottery is round; some is oval, some items like wedding vases have
two spouts, etc. It's my understanding that coil pottery is truly handformed but
that may not apply to all pieces all the time.

Best to talk to a specific artist about a specific piece to get accurate info.

[tecpatl]

Originally Posted by jaxart

Do they ever use pottery wheels for the bowl making?
Also, do they fire the pottery in "traditional" kilns or contemporary gas/electric fired ones?

A potter's wheel is never, ever used in traditional Pueblo pottery, just as Navajo rugs are not woven on a Spanish style wood loom. The coil and pinch method of building pots is ancient, and produces a pot quite different from a thrown piece.
Traditional firing is primitive, often with wood or dung, with the pot sheltered by a bucket or potsherds or whatever is at hand. I imagine some handmade pot artists might use an electric kiln, but virtually all greenware is fired in an electric kiln.
I'd expect any potters at Acoma would be on the up and up, as their standards are generally kept high, but the same might not be true of people selling elsewhere, or in some of the lower end shops in NM.
I've seen some fair amount of greenware priced and described as handmade, which is why I mentioned a couple ways to tell the difference.
They're both good....but should be priced according to what they really are.
This page has a lot of good Acoma info. and pics of work in progress
Traditional Acoma Pottery

This one shows some incredible high end hand made pieces.
Art of the Southwest: Native American Indian pottery, jewelry, rugs, Kachinas, baskets, and art from Native American Indians

[GregW]

This was on my to do list. It just moved higher. Thanks for the photos.

[jaxart]

Originally Posted by tecpatl

I imagine some handmade pot artists might use an electric kiln, but virtually all greenware is fired in an electric kiln.

Traditional Acoma Pottery

Thank you for the very informative reference on Acoma Pottery. I'm not sure why they don't permit photographs by tourists since it's obvious from that web site that the pottery IS photographed for such documentaries. And nothing to keep the purchaser from photographing it later. Wondering what explanation the tour guides offer? I know that other aspects of Indian culture are considered too "sacred" for outsiders to witness, but after all, they are selling their pots for profit and disallowing photography seems counterproductive to good marketing tactics.

I found this on that Acoma Pottery web site concerning firing of the pots:

While most traditional potters use electric kilns--an adaptation that enhances the pre-kiln Acoma high-temperature open-pit firing--their pottery is still made the way it has been for hundreds of years.

Originally Posted by Mike Horrell

Best to talk to a specific artist about a specific piece to get accurate info.

I've long been a fan of Maria Martinez of San Ildefonso Pueblo. She and her husband Julian perfected the "black on black" pottery so sought after by collectors. I found a good article on her here:

Maria Martinez - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Of course I'm taking this thread off topic by mentioning other than an Acoma potter, so I apologize for that.

[tecpatl]

There's no good reason for not allowing photographs except to protect personal designs from other tribe members who might copy them. This is always a concern of the most creative tribal artists.

The use of an electric kiln greatly reduces the chances of a pot being spoiled in firing, so it's no surprise that this is becoming common in Acoma. Electric kilns came into wide use with the greenware pots, and so became commonly available and easy to use. Collectors will pay a premium for pots that are fired in the old traditional way, however.

On the subject of black pottery...Maria Poveka Martinez was always a good potter, but an academic researcher put her on her way to perfecting the "black pot" in the early 1900s. Black pottery had been produced before, but she combined her skills with a reduction atmosphere technique to create something special. Though she rarely, if ever, created pots entirely on her own, her contribution to the art is undeniable. Her pots bring more at sale than any other historic potter.
(Her husband, sisters, and sons usually collaborated in her work, especially in decorating her perfectly formed and hand polished pots)
A similar thing occured in Oaxaca, Mexico, where a potter from San Bartolo Coyotepec named Dona Rosa created black pottery and became very famous in the early/mid 1900s. The potters of SBC produce the famous black pottery to this day.
There is also extraordinary black pottery produced at the Chihuahuan village of Mata Ortiz. This tradition is relatively new there...less than 30 years old...but the craftspeople of MO produce beautiful work. These pots are sometimes known as Casas Grandes.
Black pots are NOT created from black clay....but from regular ol' clay that at some point in the firing process is denied oxygen, thus infusing the superheated clay itself with carbon. I have seen MO potters fire a pot to be shiny black, then re-fire the same pot without the reduction atmosphere and have it return to a normal color when it emerges and cools. Very impressive combination of art and science!
A month ago I was at an auction in Michigan and purchased a pot signed Desideria for 30 dollars. It had a small interior chip on the rim, so there was not much interest in it. What most people didn't realize was that Desideria Montoya Sanchez was the sister of Maria. The pot is at the restorers right now, and will emerge as a 5 to 9 hundred dollar pot, even with the disclosed restoration. It was my Antiques Roadshow moment of the summer, and a rare chance to feel clever..lol

[Mike Horrell]

Originally Posted by jaxart

Of course I'm taking this thread off topic by mentioning other than an Acoma potter, so I apologize for that.

Oh, no, don't worry about that... this has become far more interesting for it..

[skinem]

Thank you for the pics and link to other pics. I haven't been there since the 1960s as a boy and really appreciate your post. Nice to see people still there.