Diné (Navajo) Small Seed Jar [SOLD]

The Diné have traditionally made pottery for its own use. Pottery drums and pipes were made for ceremonial use and coffee pots and cups made for daily use. It was not until after World War II, when traveling resumed and highway construction commenced on their reservation, that pottery production increased. Prior to that, only three paved roads bordered the reservation and none crossed into it, therefore there were no incentives to produce something for sale when there were no buyers.

As tourists began visiting the reservation, there became a need for inexpensive items for them to purchase as souvenirs: items less expensive than jewelry or rugs. The traders encouraged the women to make pottery to fill this need. Thus, we have the creation of a new marketable item.

Lorraine Yazzie Williams was born in Arizona during the late 1950s and was raised in Sweetwater, Arizona, near Kayenta and Teec Nos Pos, in the Four Corners region. She was not raised with exposure to the tradition of pottery making and did not begin working with clay until 1980. Three of Lorraine's seventeen brothers and sisters also work in clay.

Lorraine was adept at making beads and sand paintings and she was a weaver. Her father was a medicine man. Her mother was an herbalist.  After she married George Williams and began to be exposed to the pottery of his mother, Rose Williams, a famous potter, she began to appreciate the value of pottery and, by the early 1980s, began producing pottery of her own.

This small round jar of polished brown clay is simply but beautifully decorated with a row of reddish slipped diamonds encircling the rim and four triangles pendant below the diamonds, each triangle made up of 19 stacked impressed triangles.  The jar is a jewel of Navajo pottery.

Williams was one of the female artists featured in the national exhibit and published in the book Pottery by American Indian Women: The Legacy of Generations by Susan Peterson.  She was also invited to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. to demonstrate traditional pottery making.  She has been an award winner at Heard Museum Indian Shows as well as Santa Fe Indian Market.