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| 025 Five Jars from Acoma Pueblo |
 For seven centuries, the American Indians of Acoma Pueblo have lived in a tiny village on top of an isolated mesa in what is now west-central New Mexico. Their ancient origins are shrouded in mystery. The founders of the mesa-top Pueblo may have moved to this virtually inaccessible site as a defense measure against attacks from other Indian tribes. Once established, the village has survived at this desolate locality through endless challenges to their very existence: drought and famine, the arrival of European settlers (1540), revolt against the Spanish (1680) and subsequent reconquest (1692), takeover by the United States (1847), the arrival of the nearby transcontinental railroad (1878), and the absorption into the structure of modern American society over the last century.
Throughout their history, the Acoma Indians have excelled at the creation of beautiful pottery, which rivals the best of any stone-age people in the world. Their raw materials come from the earth, and the vessels are fired on beds of rock with slabs of fuel piled around, using techniques handed down through countless generations.
During the years just before and after 1900, the Acoma potters produced some of the most beautiful pottery of any time in their history. Somehow they felt liberated from the relatively stern decorative styles of earlier times, and burst into a new era of freedom to depict the most wonderful flowers and birds dwelling in a mystical world of rainbows, persistent with hints of esoteric symbolism surviving in both bold and delicate embellishments.
Jack Silverman has photographed separately five of these fabulous vessels by which to create a strikingly dramatic collage of forms and patterns. He has employed the technological marvels of modern science and industry with the infinite care required in the handling of paper and inks to produce a lasting tribute to the remarkable achievements of the Acoma Indian potters. He has captured the earthy textures of clay, slip, and pigments of vessels fashioned by the traditional methods handed down through countless generations. He has chosen examples that exhibit the most joyous exuberance of rhythm and color.
As separate pictures, each pot projects its own individualistic being. In the assembly of five images into one overlapping collage, the artist has imparted a collective feeling that takes on a life of its own. The effect oscillates between surreal imagery and super-real solidity. With no shadows to define spatial relationships, the artist is unrelentingly insistent that the viewer resolve for himself the conflict between complex visual patterning and true-to-life recording of structure. The former projects an observational unity in diversity in which the viewer's eyes frolic through pathways of exploration. The latter demands detection of structural clues by which to anchor each vessel to its proper position in space.
In either way of looking, the sacred parrots and the rainbow arcs give harmonious unity and a sense of reality to the human genius that created the vessel in the first place, and to the artistic inspiration that arranged for their collective depiction. The overall effect of this bold, dramatic, and elegant composition of forms conveys a spirit of joyful exuberance, faith and optimism in the powers of nature to provide for and sustain us, which is quite a worthy testament to the Acoma Pueblo People in view of the endless challenges, adversity, and oftentimes precarious existence that confronted them throughout history. Perhaps, however, it is the deer's contented munching of a flower petal that provides the resolving focal point and soothes the eye by imparting an overall harmony of both form and pattern to this remarkable picture.
-- FRANCIS H. HARLOW, LOS ALAMOS |
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