Zuni Pueblo Pottery

An accomplished Hopi-Tewa potter with an excellent pedigree, Daisy Hooee applied herself to learning everything she could about Zuni pottery. She also became a consummate Zuni potter. She took over the ceramics classes at Zuni High in 1960 and retired from teaching at the high school in 1974 (she continued teaching a group of older women at her home for a few years).

Jennie Laate, an Acoma woman who married into Zuni and learned the Zuni way from Daisy, took over teaching the classes in 1974. Many of today’s well known Zuni potters thank Jennie Laate for her teaching and inspiration. She taught until 1990 when she turned the classes over to one of her former students, Noreen Simplicio. Noreen taught the classes for 2 years. When it became clear that Jennie Laate was not going to be coming back, Gabriel Paloma took over teaching the classes.

Josephine Nahohai brought traditional Zuni pottery designs back into the community in the 1980s. Les Namingha has also recently been using more traditional Zuni shapes and designs in his Zuni revival pottery.

Today, because so many Zuni potters learned their craft at Zuni High School, most of them use electric kilns for firing their works. Other than that, they all use the same traditional methods of gathering and processing the clay, making their pottery and painting their designs, traditional processes that are practiced in virtually the same way in all the pueblos.