Traditional Santo Domingo Design

Traditional Santo Domingo Design

Santo Domingo is considered a very conservative pueblo, especially when it comes to their religion. Their religion affects every aspect of the people's lives at Santo Domingo. Due to what has happened to them since Coronado and his men first arrived, they have become very secretive in regards to every aspect of their religious practices.

For example, artists are not allowed to depict human forms, especially on products meant for sale to outsiders. That restricts the artist's palette to images of birds, flowers, fish and various geometric patterns symbolizing water, forest, clouds, rain and lightning bolts. There is also a tradition at Santo Domingo of painting their pots completely in the negative using black and red pigments, rather than just painting in black and red on their usual "white" background slip.

Back in the 1920s, Kenneth Chapman, from the Museum of New Mexico, became worried that the Santo Domingo pottery tradition was dying. So he went there and, sitting among the potters, he copied the designs each were painting on their pots and made a book of those. Thomas Tenorio has told us that book is where he got many of his designs from.

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