Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery

Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery establishes a new model for exhibition development and curation that centers the voices and living traditions of Native American people of what is now the Southwestern United States. The Vilcek Foundation worked closely with the School for Advanced Research (SAR) and the Indian Arts Research Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the exhibition, curated by the Pueblo Pottery Collective.

The Pueblo Pottery Collective is a collective of more than 60 Native American community members from twenty-two Pueblo communities in the Southwest, including potters, designers, and other artists, writers, poets, community leaders, and museum professionals. A small selection of non-Pueblo museum professionals were facilitators and writers for this project and are also part of this collective. The collective was established specifically for the development of the traveling exhibition, to provide insights and perspective on selected works from two major collections of Pueblo pottery: the collection of the Indian Arts Research Center and the Vilcek Collection. Essays range from recollections on the practices of gathering clay and preparing pigments to poetry and essays reflecting on the works and their meanings. 

“Grounded in Clay emphasizes the underlying, multifaceted, and nuanced understandings that the Pueblo Indian people of the American Southwest have of one of the more ubiquitous and resilient forms of our material culture—pottery,” writes curator Joseph Aguilar. “Historical memories and our understanding of pottery and other cultural patrimonies are tantamount to a form of Indigenous intellect—a physical, spiritual, and intellectual worldview that is inextricably linked to land, people, and history.” This audiobook features the voices of the Pueblo Pottery Collective themselves and includes an accompanying PDF with works from the catalogue for easy reference.