Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery

Storage jar by Arroh-a-och, Laguna, ca. 1870–1880, clay and paint, image courtesy of School for Advanced Research collection.

Pueblo Indian pottery embodies four main natural elements: earth, water, air, and fire. It is an art form literally of land and place, and is one of America’s ancient Indigenous creative expressions.

Foregrounding Pueblo voices and aesthetics, Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery  is the first community-curated Native American exhibition in the history of The Met. The effort features more than one hundred historical, modern, and contemporary clay works and offers a critical understanding of Pueblo pottery as community-based knowledge and personal experience.

Dating from the eleventh century to the present day, the featured artworks represent the aesthetic lineages of New Mexico’s nineteen Río Grande Pueblos as well as the West Texas community of Ysleta del Sur and the Hopi tribe of Arizona—sovereign Indigenous nations where pots and other ceramic works have been made and used for millennia. Visual and material languages of pottery and intergenerational narratives are highlighted throughout the exhibition.

Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery was curated by the Pueblo Pottery Collective, a group that includes sixty individual members of diverse ages, backgrounds, and professions, who represent twenty-one source communities. Selected works are from two significant Pueblo pottery collections—the Indian Arts Research Center of the School for Advanced Research (SAR) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Vilcek Foundation, New York, New York.