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Accession #	1990.68
Maker	Grace Chino
Title	Vase
Date	1989
Medium	Clay, slip
Dimensions	15 x 36 3/8 in. (38.1 x 92.4cm) diameter at top: 2 7/8 in. (7.3 cm)
Credit Line	Augustus Graham School of Design Fund
Location	American Identities: Inventing American Landscape
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. Condition: Excellent

Curatorial Remarks:

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.