Brooklyn Museum: Arts of the Americas: Vase

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Vase

When I'm doing my pottery I think of Mom [Marie Z. Chino] first, and that she could help me. I want to do like she does. She didn't need outlining, she just painted, and sometimes I do that now I know the design and I just do it.

-Grace Chino, quoted in Rick Dillingham, Fourteen Families in Pueblo Pottery (1994)

The Chino family, led by the matriarch Marie Z. Chino, was innovative in adapting the designs found on prehistoric pottery shards to modern pottery forms. Grace Chino here used a dazzling, closely lined black-and-white design on a new vessel form reminiscent of ancient Pueblo pots. The result is a form of abstraction that embraces tradition as essential to innovation.

Maker: Grace Chino, Acoma Pueblo, Native American, 1929-1995
Medium: Clay, slip
Place Made: Acoma, New Mexico, USA
Dates: 1989
Dimensions: 15 in. high x 36 3/8 in. diameter (38.1 x 92.4cm) diameter at top: 2 7/8 in. (7.3 cm)
Collections: Arts of the Americas
Museum Location: This item is on view in American Identities: A New Look, Modern Life, 5th Floor
Accession Number: 1990.68
Credit Line: Augustus Graham School of Design Fund
Image: Overall, 1990.68_SL1.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph

Catalogue Description: Clay pot with overall dark brown and cream-white design except for bottom area which is undecorated cream-white. The Chaco Canyon stepped design decreases as it moves from the lower, bulbous body of the pot to the upper, cylindrical neck, giving the viewer the illusion of greater depth in space.

Collections: Arts of the Americas: Vase