Hopi Pueblo Polychrome Migration Pattern Jar [SOLD]

The migration pattern has been defined as representing the migration of the Hopi through four worlds.  The parallel lines presumably represent the migration of the Hopi.  Nampeyo rarely painted this design as it was probably too restrictive and did not allow her to be more creative in her layout.  Her daughters, Fannie and Nellie, seemed to be the first generation of the family to consistently use the design—Fannie even more so than Nellie.

This migration pattern jar by Nellie is an exceptional one.  It was purchased by the current owners in 1989 who were told it was made in 1965.  The fineness of the painting would reinforce it was from that period, a period when Nellie was producing beautiful work.

Nellie was one of three daughters of Nampeyo and Lesso.  She was between the oldest daughter, Annie, and the youngest, Fannie.  She too was a potter and she lived to be 82 years old.  Nellie was taken to the Grand Canyon, when just a child, when her mother was convinced to spend the summer there at the newly constructed "Hopi House" built by the Fred Harvey Company.  Nampeyo was there to demonstrate pottery making for tourists but the whole family was intended to show the way the Hopi lived.

In 1910, the business community in Chicago sponsored a United States Land and Irrigation Exposition in the Chicago Coliseum to draw attention to modern machinery as contrasted to what was considered primitive techniques of native cultures.  Ever aware of an opportunity to lure travelers to the southwest, the Santa Fe Railway commissioned a brown stucco pueblo style house on-site to be inhabited by Indians from Hopi.  Of course, Nampeyo was requested to represent the Hopi as the pottery maker, and her daughter Nellie, who was about 16 at the time, accompanied her parents on the Santa Fe train to Chicago.  Nellie was perhaps one of the very few young Hopi who had spent a summer at the Grand Canyon and ridden a train to Chicago.

Nellie was apparently not a prolific potter as we have had fewer of her works than we have had by her sister, Fannie.  I did purchase pottery from Nellie in the early to mid-1970s but only smaller works, nothing major.  This jar I consider to be a major work by Nellie.

Condition: this Hopi Pueblo Polychrome Migration Pattern Jar is in very good condition

Provenance: from the collection of a family from Atlanta, Georgia, which purchased it from Bien Mur Indian Market Center, Albuquerque, in 1989.

Recommended Reading: Fourteen Families in Pueblo Pottery by Rick Dillingham

Photo courtesy of Rick Dillingham. (Fourteen Families In Pueblo Pottery).