Art News

The religious and political powers of clay

By Jim Duncan

8/2/2023

“In A Sacred Manner I Walk.” Eight inches diameter. Native American Pottery. White Clay. Pahponee (Snow Woman). Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas/ Citizen Band Potawatomi. Photo Credit: Greg Elston

The great Kickapoo artist Pahponee (Snow Woman) taught this writer about the religious qualities of clay. After seeing a sacred white buffalo and a white buffalo calf, she started dreaming about white buffalo pottery. She knew nothing about ceramics but was so moved by her dreams and visions that she turned her life over to realizing them.

She bought land in Decatur County that had a clay bed creek. She bought and raised buffalo there. She lived there with her husband, Greg, and small children in a teepee through Iowa winters without heat or running water.

She revived an old Kickapoo-Potawatomi pottery tradition mining her own clay and firing her pots with dung from her buffalo herd. By the time I visited her, she had moved into a modern house and studio she built with the money her pots generated. Her life changed that second time after she won the grand prize at the Santa Fe Indian Market and a bidding war between Ted Turner and Sly Stallone commenced. The winning pot was the white buffalo pot of her vision. One version of it can been seen in the lobby of the Hotel Casino at Meskwaki, which has the best collection of Native American art in Iowa.

The star attraction this summer at Des Moines Art Center is called “Underneath Everything – Humility and Grandeur in Contemporary Ceramics.” The show is rife with the mysticism of clay that so moved Pahponee. Curator Mia Laufer begins her reflections on the show with the tale of the golem. That was clay turned human in an old Jewish Czech parable. The golem still resides, no longer animate, in Prague and sells as many T shirts as any tourist attraction there, including the city’s legendary absinthe bars.

Glenn Adamson, editor of “The Journal of Modern Craft,” uses history to enlighten the curious to the power of clay. “It was potters, not economists, who invented the idea of added value. I am thinking of the Archaic Period when ceramics were first made. The introduction of durable vessels transformed lives and whole cultures, partly by improving food preparation but most importantly by making possible the long-term storage of grain. This was an important development because it made agricultural communities viable. The introduction of surplus into the social equation also raised questions of control: Who would control surplus and therefore have power?”

This exhibition deals with that question, employing fired clay to make political statements about power. Cannupa Hanska Luger’s “Everyone” is a veil of clay beads collected in communities across Canada and the U.S. Each bead was fired with a prayer — “This is too many. This is enough. This has to stop.” The veil forms a stunning portrait of one of the Missing or Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Queer and Trans (MMIWGQT) members.

Eliza Au’s “Sanctuary” entices one to circumambulate the sculpture to examine details, like Buddhists at a stupa. There is an ornamental quality to the work that snares iconographic meaning.

Simone Leigh, who professes that she makes art only for Black women, has the most dramatic piece in the show. “Panoptica” is a ceramic pipe extending from a raffia skirt similar to the teleuk houses of Cameroon and Chad. The title of the work is the name of an architectural form of maximum security prisons in the 18th century. Laufer writes that the artwork “traces a line through history telling the story of Africans kidnapped from their homes through to today’s mass incarceration crisis.”

There are 17 other artists represented here. Most have political, WOKE statements like the three discussed. But the show has plenty of dazzle and charm for those who care nothing for politics. It plays through Sept. 10.