Acoma Pueblo Intricate Design Water Jar [SOLD]

Much praise has been bestowed on Marie Z. Chino for the magnificent pottery she made in the fifty years she devoted to the craft and the praise is certainly earned.  Chino was a master potter and it is understandable why collectors admire her work so enthusiastically.  She was certainly one of the Acoma potters who made particularly important contributions to the art of pottery making in the period following World War II. Chino was making Southwest Indian pottery as early as the 1920s.

She was known to be a patient and generous teacher.  When teaching she would first allow her students to fill in the lines. When she thought students ready, she would let them paint the whole pot.  Many of her students have gone on to become prize winning potters themselves.  She won her first award at Indian Market when she was only 15 years old.  Some of her pieces were among the prizewinners at the first Southwest Indian Fair (predecessor to Santa Fe's Indian Market) in 1922.

Chino is considered one of the significant ceramicists at Acoma and was the matriarch of a very talented family of potters. She is best known for her black-on-white pottery.  Along with Lucy Lewis and Sarah Garcia she led the revival of the ancient pottery forms of the ancestral pueblo potters.   She was one of the women who was inspirational in the movement to revive the use of ancient Mimbres designs on contemporary Acoma pottery.

This jar could be described as displaying bolts of lightning, fine lines representing rain, floral elements, circles, ovoids and diamonds.  Marie Chino was eminently qualified to conceive and execute such a complicated design.  The design covers the entire surface of the jar except for a small portion of red pigment at the base, placed there to continue an Acoma tradition.

Condition: very good condition with only a very few spall spots which are hardly visible through the intricate design.

Recommended Reading:  Acoma & Laguna Pottery by Rick Dillingham

Provenance: from a gentleman from Colorado who is downsizing his pottery collection