Angela Corona, zzcg3b113, Owl effigy with an owl, branch and geometric design

$125.00

A polychrome owl effigy jar decorated with a sgraffito-and-painted owl, branch and geometric design

In stock

SKU: zzcg3b113 Category: Tags: , , , ,
Corona, Angela
Dimensions 3.75 × 3.75 × 5.5 in
Measurement

Measurement includes stand
Condition of Piece

Excellent
Date Born

2023
Signature

Angela Corona

Brand

Corona, Angela

Maria de Los Angeles (Angela) Corona was born into a potting family in the village of Mata Ortiz in northern Mexico in 1987. She started playing with clay at an early age but didn't really make anything until her brother, Vidal Corona, took her under his wing and taught her the whole traditional process.

Angela began making pots in different forms and styles, eventually finding her own style with a distinctive owl effigy pot, decorated generally with sgraffito outlines and painted owl figures with Paquimé geometrics. She's also done well with seed pots and repoussé lizards, all painted in Paquimé Revival multicolored geometric designs.

Angela is married to Mata Ortiz potter Oscar Ramirez and they often collaborate on pieces. Both tend to leave more open spaces in their individual designs but when working together, they seem to prefer to cover the surface of a piece almost completely with bands of different colored geometrics. She also makes repoussé animals on some of her pieces while he makes lids for some of his. Deisy Ramirez and Jazmin Ramirez are their daughters.

The Corona family is also known for making blank pots for other potters to decorate.

About Mata Ortiz and Casas Grandes

Mata Ortiz is a small settlement inside the bounds of the Casas Grandes municipality, very near the site of Paquimé. The fortunes of the town have gone up and down over the years with a real economic slump happening after the local railroad repair yard was relocated to Nuevo Casas Grandes in the early 1960s. It was a village with a past and little future.

A problem around the ancient sites has been the looting of ancient pottery. From the 1950s on, someone could dig up an old pot, clean it up a bit and sell it to an American dealer (and those were everywhere) for more money than they'd make in a month with a regular job. And there's always been a shortage of regular jobs.

Many of the earliest potters in Mata Ortiz began learning to make pots when it started getting harder to find true ancient pots. So their first experiments turned out crude pottery but with a little work, their pots could be "antiqued" enough to pass muster as being ancient. Over a few years each modern potter got better and better until finally, their work could hardly be distinguished from the truly ancient. Then the Mexican Antiquities Act was passed and terror struck: because the old and the new could not be differentiated, potters were having all their property seized and their families put out of their homes because of "antiqued" pottery they made just yesterday. Things had to change almost overnight and several potters destroyed large amounts of their own inventory because it looked "antique." Then they went about rebooting the process and the product in Mata Ortiz.

For more info:
Mata Ortiz pottery at Wikipedia
Mata Ortiz at Wikipedia
Casas Grandes at Wikipedia

Contemporary Pottery

The term "contemporary" has several possible shadings in reference to Southwestern pottery. At some pueblos, it's more an indicator of a modern style of carving or etching than anything else. At San Felipe it refers to almost anything newly made there as they have almost no prehistoric templates to work from. At Jemez the situation resolved to where what makes a piece uniquely "Jemez" is the clay. Any designs on that clay can be said to be "contemporary."

About Effigies

An effigy is a sculpture or model of an animal or person. Effigies have a long history among southwestern Native Americans. Effigies include everything from pottery that explicitly resembles a human or an actual animal to pottery that only references a part or parts of a human or an animal in its shape to creations of creatures that are absolutely wild and whimsical.

A duck decoy woven of local reeds more than 2,000 years ago, found in Lovelock Cave near Lovelock, Nevada

In Nevada, near the Humboldt Sink (where the Humboldt River disappears into the desert sands), a group of guano miners working in Lovelock Cave in 1911 exposed some ancient artifacts while they were digging. Shortly after the miners left, some archaeologists arrived and started poking around and digging, too. They weren't much better educated in the practices of archaeological digging than the guano miners were but they did save almost everything they found. It was more than a decade after those archaeologists investigated the cave that other archaeologists dug a bit deeper in the back of the cave and found a bundle of eleven duck decoys, all woven of local reeds more than 2,300 years ago. Some were painted, some were decorated with feathers, some weren't finished yet.

Effigies have been found in Mayan ruins, Aztec ruins, the ruins of Teotihuacan, the ruins near Valdivia in Ecuador, the ruins of the pyramid-building cultures in Peru and ruins near the Caribbean coast in Colombia. There were many effigies found in the ruins of Paquimé, too.

Photo of the duck decoy courtesy of the Autry Museum, CCA-by-SA 3.0 License.

About Geometric Designs

"Geometric design" is a catch-all term. Yes, we use it to denote some kind of geometric design but that can include everything from symbols, icons and designs from ancient rock art to lace and calico patterns imported by early European pioneers to geometric patterns from digital computer art. In some pueblos, the symbols and patterns denoting mountains, forest, wildlife, birds and other elements sometimes look more like computer art that has little-to-no resemblance to what we have been told they symbolize. Some are built-up layers of patterns, too, each with its own meaning.

"Checkerboard" is a geometric design but a simple black-and-white checkerboard can be interpreted as clouds or stars in the sky, a stormy night, falling rain or snow, corn in the field, kernels of corn on the cob and a host of other things. It all depends on the context it is used in, and it can have several meanings in that context at the same time. Depending on how the colored squares are filled in, various basket weave patterns can easily be made, too.

"Cuadrillos" is a term from Mata Ortiz. It denotes a checkerboard-like design using tiny squares filled in with paints to construct larger patterns.

"Kiva step" is a stepped geometric design pattern denoting a path into the spiritual dimension of the kiva. "Spiral mesa" is a similar pattern, although easily interpreted with other meanings, too. The Dineh have a similar "cloud terrace" pattern.

That said, "geometric designs" proliferated on Puebloan pottery after the Spanish, Mexican and American settlers arrived with their European-made (or influenced) fabrics and ceramics. The newcomers' dinner dishes and printed fabrics contributed much material to the pueblo potters design palette, so much and for so long that many of those imported designs and patterns are considered "traditional" now.

Juan Quezada Family and Teaching Tree - Mata Ortiz

Disclaimer: This "family and teaching tree" is a best effort on our part to determine who the potters are in this grouping and arrange them in a generational order/order of influence. Complicating this for Mata Ortiz is that everyone essentially teaches everyone else (including the neighbors), so it's hard to get a real lineage of family/teaching. The general information available is scant. This diagram is subject to change as we get better info.


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