A Second Ekphrastic Essay About Our 2022 Road Trip: on the Universality of Pottery

 

Mayans from Mars by Diego Romero 

While we were in New Mexico, I kept saying, and only half-jokingly, how much I wanted to go to Roswell. It’s a place that lives in pop culture because of its UFO-entangled history, and it makes me think about Project Blue Book and The X-Files and other TV shows with bad attitudes toward aliens from other worlds. These attitudes synch with the all-too-common hate-filled reactions to other peoples and nations that pollute our current political landscape. My own attitude toward visitors from other planets is more benign, if also more skeptical, but Greg and I just couldn’t justify the detour to go to the UFO Museum.

Later, on our way home, once again in New Mexico and at the Albuquerque Museum, we saw some ceramic work by Diego Romero, who is of Cochiti Pueblo descent and lives in Santa Fe. The piece I like best is called Mayans from Mars. Its form is not unusual – it’s a bowl with a black-and-white design on its inner surface. Some of that design is simple and geometric, but the rest is as peculiar and intriguing as anything I would have seen in Roswell. Within the bowl, Romero’s often-featured Chongo Brothers characters can be seen driving their vehicle at night under a star-filled sky. They look a little tense, maybe because far above them there’s a small craft emitting a beam that limns the brothers’ vehicle with jagged energy. Just ahead of and not so far above them is one of the eponymous Mayans from Mars in a space helmet of sorts, which makes him look like a disembodied head. He’s just up there, not doing anything in particular, but making us wonder where the Mayans came from and why they were so good at describing the orbit of Mars long before Kepler did. 

Romero makes earthenware bowls and other ceramic pieces from New Mexico clay and commercial glaze, and he brings elements from his Cochiti heritage into his work. Because he and his brother Mateo, who is also an artist, were raised in Berkeley, CA, and because their mother is non-Native, the two men felt that they were seen as outsiders when they first moved to the land where their father was born. The Chongo Brothers, Diego says, “are comic book figures that represent our journey through the arts and Indian country.” He says that when he creates comic-book-style images, he blends them with elements of Native design, notably Ancestral Puebloan and Mimbres.

On the last day of our trip, on the day after we saw Romero’s work at the Albuquerque Museum, we stopped at the Deming Luna Mimbres Museum. Deming is on the Mimbres River, which lends its name to a region of the Southwest and to the people who lived there nearly a thousand years ago and made distinctive black-on-white pottery. The museum has an impressive collection of this pottery, which is notable, not only for its complex geometric designs but for depictions of animals and humans that are both fanciful and artfully rendered.  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many pieces of Mimbres pottery were excavated by archeologists and taken to museums in the East. And then for about four decades after the Great Depression, looters dug up as much Mimbres pottery as they could find in order to sell it. Sad to say, Diego Romero will never be influenced by any of those lost and looted works of art.   

By Peter D. Tillman - Man and crane, Mangas/Mimbres pot, CC BY-SA 2.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50626421

Later, we watched a YouTube lecture on Mimbres pottery and culture, posted by the instructor of a pottery-making class, Marc Lancet, who shows examples of these striking pots and talks about how they were made. He says that similar pottery-making processes have been used by groups of human beings all over the world,  and he adds that, “All the techniques we're going to be using are ubiquitous to the human race on every continent. And I find that very unifying; it's very encouraging to think about the common way that we all approached our early existence and the materials around us."

Making pottery, it seems, links humans of many historical, cultural, and geographical periods and cultures, so this is a good time to note that while we were in Ohio (more about that later), we visited the city of East Liverpool, once known as the Pottery Capital of the United States.  A hundred years ago there were 270 kilns in the city, but now there is only one kiln left standing. We stopped to take a close look at it because the imposingly solid brick form of that old bottle kiln is a fitting monument to the time when there were more than a dozen pottery companies operating in East Liverpool. In those days most of the city’s population was involved in the production of ceramics, especially dinnerware. The city initially became a hub for pottery-making because of nearby Ohio River clay that was so abundantlyavailable; American Indians had shown this resource to the European settlers. 

While we were in East Liverpool we visited the Museum of Ceramics, which features many examples of yellowware made from the yellow-pigmented local clay. Our knowledgeable guide (who also made sure that we knew that in East Liverpool at least, the word kiln is pronounced “kill”) pointed out that by the early twentieth century yellowware was no longer in vogue, and clay was brought in from elsewhere to make the more desirable white china. The museum has a major exhibit of the fine china called Lotus Ware; it also has a compelling display that shows the difficult and sometimes health-destroying process of making ceramics, which often involved the whole family, including children, working together. 

Because of research I had done before our trip, I remembered that down by the Ohio River where the yellow clay can be found, hundreds of petroglyphs cover the surfaces of large flat rocks, very near to East Liverpool. The images inscribed in the rocks are unusual and distinctive, but in the 1920s a series of dams was built, and more dams were added in the 1950s, so the petroglyphs are now underwater. Before they were lost to view, an East Liverpool man transferred imprints of the petroglyphs onto large sheets of absorbent paper. I knew that the Museum had these imprints, and I knew I wanted to see them. But when I asked about the petroglyph imprints, I was told that they weren’t available for viewing, nor were there any Native American artifacts on display at the Museum of Ceramics. Which was too bad, not only because Native people make damn fine pottery, but because describing them would really have brought this meditation on the seemingly universal nature of pottery arts full circle.