Ida Sahmie (born Nobell 1960) [1] is a Navajo potter. Sahmie combines Hopi traditional pottery making methods and Navajo iconography in her work. She has work in the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian.
Sahmie is Navajo and was born in 1960 outside of Pine Springs, Arizona. [2] She married a Hopi man, Andrew "Louie" Sahmie, and moved to the Hopi reservation. [2] She learned pottery making from her mother in law, Priscilla Namingha. [2] Sahmie began to sell her pottery in the 1980s. [3]
The shape of the pottery that Sahmie makes is based on Hopi traditions and incorporates traditional Navajo designs and iconography, such as Yei designs. [3] Sahmie prefers to use clay mined from the Navajo reservation and uses white and yellow clay in the body of the pots. [2] Black slip is created by adding wild spinach to the mixture. [2] Pots are fired outdoors using traditional methods. [2]
Sahmie has work in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, [1] and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian. [2]
Nampeyo was a Hopi-Tewa potter who lived on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona. Her Tewa name was also spelled Num-pa-yu, meaning "snake that does not bite". Her name is also cited as "Nung-beh-yong," Tewa for Sand Snake.
Maria Poveka Montoya Martinez was a Puebloan artist who created internationally known pottery. Martinez, her husband Julian, and other family members, including her son Popovi Da, examined traditional Pueblo pottery styles and techniques to create pieces which reflect the Pueblo people's legacy of fine artwork and crafts. The works of Maria Martinez, and especially her black ware pottery, are in the collections of many museums, including the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, and more. The Penn Museum in Philadelphia holds eight vessels – three plates and five jars – signed either "Marie" or "Marie & Julian".
Lucy Martin Lewis was a Native American potter from Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico. She is known for her black-on-white decorative ceramics made using traditional techniques.
Maria Margarita "Margaret" Tafoya was the matriarch of Santa Clara Pueblo potters. She was a recipient of a 1984 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.
Nathan Youngblood is a Native American potter from Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, United States.
Charles Sequevya Loloma was a Hopi Native American artist known for his jewelry. He also worked in pottery, painting and ceramics.
Martha Hopkins Struever (1931–2017) was an American Indian art dealer, author, and leading scholar on historic and contemporary Pueblo Indian pottery and Pueblo and Navajo Indian jewelry. In June 2015, a new gallery in the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, was named for her. The first permanent museum gallery devoted to Native American jewelry, the Martha Hopkins Struever Gallery, is part of the Center for the Study of Southwestern Jewelry.
Art of the American Southwest is the visual arts of the Southwestern United States. This region encompasses Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of California, Colorado, Nevada, Texas, and Utah. These arts include architecture, ceramics, drawing, filmmaking, painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, and other media, ranging from the ancient past to the contemporary arts of the present day.
Faye Tso (1933–2004) was a Navajo potter and herbal medicine healer. Her pieces are known for their nontraditional imagery of corn maidens, warriors, and dancers, whereas Navajo pottery typically has little decoration. Born in Coal Mine Mesa, Arizona, Tso was relocated with other Navajos to Tuba City, Arizona in 1974 because of a land dispute between the Navajo and Hopi tribes. She returned to dig her clay at Coal Mine Mesa, where she also gathered pinon from which she extracted the pitch resin used to coat and seal her Dineh pottery. In 1990, the Arizona Indian Living Treasures Association designated Tso as a living treasure. Her husband and son are medicine men and use Tso's pots in their ceremonies.
Louise Rose Goodman is a Navajo folk artist and ceramicist.
Dextra Quotskuyva Nampeyo was a Native American potter and artist. She was in the fifth generation of a distinguished ancestral line of Hopi potters.
Alice Williams Cling is a Native American ceramist and potter known for creating beautiful and innovative pottery that has a distinctive rich reds, purples, browns and blacks that have a polished and shiny exteriors, revolutionizing the functional to works of art. Critics have argued that she is the most important Navajo potter of the last 25 years.
Christine McHorse, also known as Christine Nofchissey McHorse, was a Navajo ceramic artist from Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Margaret Wood is a Navajo-Seminole fiber artist, fashion designer, and quilt maker. Though she began her career as a teacher and librarian, Wood switched to fiber arts to allow her to express her creativity. She published Native American Fashion: Modern Adaptations of Traditional Designs, which for four decades was the only book focused on traditional native clothing and how it was modified in contemporary design. From 1990, Wood primarily became a quilter, displaying her works at numerous featured exhibitions throughout the United States, including such venues as the American Craft Museum in Manhattan; the Heard Museum of Phoenix, Arizona; the Riverside Metropolitan Museum of Riverside, California and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian of Santa Fe, New Mexico, among many others.
Betty Manygoats is a Navajo artist known for her ceramic work. She lives and works at Cow Springs on the Navajo Nation in Arizona in the American Southwest.
Deborah Clashin, also known as Debbie Clashin, is a Hopi-Tewa Tobacco Clan potter.
Daisy Hooee Nampeyo was a Hopi-Tewa potter. She studied at École des Beaux-Arts. Hooee taught pottery making on the Zuni reservation and helped preserve the traditional techniques she learned from her grandmother, Nampeyo.
Black-on-black ware is a 20th- and 21st-century pottery tradition developed by Puebloan Native American ceramic artists in Northern New Mexico. Traditional reduction-fired blackware has been made for centuries by Pueblo artists and other artists around the world. Pueblo black-on-black ware of the past century is produced with a smooth surface, with the designs applied through selective burnishing or the application of refractory slip. Another style involves carving or incising designs and selectively polishing the raised areas. For generations several families from Kha'po Owingeh and P'ohwhóge Owingeh pueblos have been making black-on-black ware with the techniques passed down from matriarch potters. Artists from other pueblos have also produced black-on-black ware. Several contemporary artists have created works honoring the pottery of their ancestors.
Pueblo pottery are ceramic objects made by the Indigenous Pueblo people and their antecedents, the Ancestral Puebloans and Mogollon cultures in the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico. For centuries, pottery has been central to pueblo life as a feature of ceremonial and utilitarian usage. The clay is locally sourced, most frequently handmade, and fired traditionally in an earthen pit. These items take the form of storage jars, canteens, serving bowls, seed jars, and ladles. Some utility wares were undecorated except from simple corrugations or marks made with a stick or fingernail, however many examples for centuries were painted with abstract or representational motifs. Some pueblos made effigy vessels, fetishes or figurines. During modern times, pueblo pottery was produced specifically as an art form to serve an economic function. This role is not dissimilar to prehistoric times when pottery was traded throughout the Southwest, and in historic times after contact with the Spanish colonialists.