Priscilla Namingha

Last updated
Priscilla Namingha Nampeyo
Photo of Priscilla Namingha Nampeyo.jpg
Born1924 (1924)
Died2008 (aged 8384)
NationalityHopi
Known forPottery

Priscilla Namingha Nampeyo (1924 - 2008) was a Hopi-Tewa potter who was known for her traditional pottery. Namingha mined her own clay and created her own pigments for her large pots. Her work is in the collection of several museums and cultural centers.

Contents

Early life

Priscilla Namingha was born in 1924, was Hopi-Tewa and lived in Polacca, First Mesa. [1] [2] [3] Namingha was the oldest daughter of Rachel Namingha and sister of Dextra Quotskuyva, Lillian Gonzales and Elenor Lucas, all of whom were potters. [4] [3] She is a great-granddaughter of potter, Nampeyo. [3] Priscilla Namingha's daughters also went on to become potters. [4] Namingha stated that she learned to create pottery by watching her mother work. [5] As a girl, she also learned pottery techniques from Nampeyo. [1] Namingha kept making pottery almost up to her death in 2008. [1]

Work

Namingha's work is part of the Nampeyo family tradition of pottery making. [1] Her pottery uses "fine-line" decorations and incorporates patterns based on birds and feathers. [3] Namingha used about 20 of the traditional designs created by Nampeyo. [3] The traditional meanings of the designs however, had been lost by the time Namingha's mother was incorporating these patterns and symbols. [3] Her pots are large, often around 20 inches or more in diameter. [6]

Namnigha used clay mined from the First Mesa and processed it by grinding the hard clay and adding ground sandstone to the mixture. [3] Black paint for the decorations is made from the Rocky Mountain bee plant and yellow rock for the reddish color in the designs. [6] She painted with a yucca brush. [6]

She fired her pottery in the ground, first burning wood into charcoal and then laying around 8 to 10 pots on top of the coal and added sheep dung. [6] Between the pots, she placed pot shards and rocks, for air circulation, and then more sheep dung on top. [6] Then the pots would smolder in the fire pit for several hours. [6]

Namingha has done pottery demonstrations and shown her work at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology. [7] She also has work in the collections of the Morgan Collection of Southwest Pueblo Pottery, [8] the Heard Museum, the Hopi Cultural Center Museum, and the Museum of Northern Arizona. [1]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nampeyo</span> Hopi-Tewa potter (1859–1942)

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.

The Hopi-Tewa are a Tewa Pueblo group that resides on the eastern part of the Hopi Reservation on or near First Mesa in northeastern Arizona.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maria Martinez</span> Native American potter (ca. 1887–1980)

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".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lucy M. Lewis</span> Native American potter

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fannie Nampeyo</span> Native American artist (1900–1987)

Fannie Nampeyo (1900–1987) was a modern and contemporary fine arts potter, who carried on the traditions of her famous mother, Nampeyo of Hano, the grand matriarch of modern Hopi pottery.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Margaret Tafoya</span> Santa Clara Pueblo traditional pottery artist (1904–2001)

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.

Elva Nampeyo (1926–1985) was an American studio potter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tyra Naha</span> American potter

Tyra Naha represents the 4th generation in a family of well-known Hopi potters. She is a Native American potter from the Hopi Tribe of Arizona in the Southwest United States. While she is currently not as well known as her famous elders, she is technically nicely proficient. Her work has been featured at shows in Santa Fe and at the Heard Museum, and appears in The Art of the Hopi.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helen Naha</span> Native American artist (1922–1993)

Helen Naha (1922–1993) was the matriarch in a family of well known Hopi-Tewa potters.

Polacca is an unincorporated community in Navajo County, of northeastern Arizona, United States. It is Hopi-Tewa community on the Hopi Reservation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Art of the American Southwest</span> Visual arts of the Southwestern United States

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dextra Quotskuyva</span> Native American potter and artist (1928–2019)

Dextra Quotskuyva Nampeyo was a Native American potter and artist. She was in the fifth generation of a distinguished ancestral line of Hopi potters.

Grace Chapella (1874–1980) was a renowned Hopi-Tewa potter from a Tewa village and of the Bear Clan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joy Navasie</span>

Joy Navasie was a Hopi-Tewa potter. Her work has been recognized globally.

Deborah Clashin, also known as Debbie Clashin, is a Hopi-Tewa Tobacco Clan potter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daisy Hooee</span> 20th-century artist

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.

Ida Sahmie 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Black-on-black ware</span> Type of Native American pottery

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pueblo pottery</span> Pottery of the Pueblo people of the American Southwest

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.

Paqua Naha, also known as "Frog Woman", was a Hopi-Tewa potter. She worked in the "black-and-red on yellow" style of pottery, which Nampeyo popularized as Sikyátki revival ware. She became well known as a potter by the 1920s and started using a frog hallmark to sign her works. Late in her career, she experimented with white slips and innovated a whiteware technique. Naha was the matriarch of the Naha/Navasie family, and several of her descendants went on to become notable potters in their own right, including Joy Navasie and Helen Naha. Her works are included in the collections of the National Museum of the American Indian, the Museum of Northern Arizona, and the Heard Museum.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 "Priscilla Namingha Nampeyo". In the Eyes of the Pot. Retrieved 2020-08-06.
  2. Bruner, Betsey (30 June 2013). "More Than Social Dances". Arizona Daily Sun. p. A1. Retrieved 6 August 2020 via Newspapers.com. "Festival". Arizona Daily Sun. 30 June 2013. p. A8. Retrieved 6 August 2020 via Newspapers.com.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Peterson 1980, p. 23.
  4. 1 2 Maxwell Museum of Anthropology 1978, p. 18.
  5. Maxwell Museum of Anthropology 1978, p. 38.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Peterson 1980, p. 24.
  7. "Maxwell Exhibit to Reveal Evolution of Pueblo Pottery". Albuquerque Journal. 1974-05-09. p. 27. Retrieved 2020-08-06 via Newspapers.com.
  8. Namingha, Priscilla (1982). "Jar signed Priscilla Namingha". SOAR.

Sources