Greg Garcia, zzsc2m062: Black water jar with a flared opening

$525.00

A plain, highly polished black water jar with a flared opening

In stock

SKU: zzsc2m062 Category: Tags: , ,
Garcia, Greg
Dimensions 3.75 × 3.75 × 4.5 in
Condition of Piece

Very good, normal wear
Signature

Greg Garcia Santa Clara Pue

Brand

Garcia, Greg

The son of Lydia Tafoya, of Santa Clara and Santiago Garcia, of Ohkay Owingeh, Greg Garcia was born in 1961 and passed on in 2010. When he was 14, his grandmother, Severa Tafoya, began teaching him how to make pottery the traditional way.

Greg made blackware and redware vases, jars and bowls. He liked to carve the avanyu (the mythic Tewa water serpent), bear paws and geometric designs on his pieces.

Greg was a participant in the Santa Fe Indian Market for about 20 years, earning several ribbons for his classic shapes and highly polished pieces there. He only participated in the Eight Northern Pueblos Arts & Crafts Show for a few years in the late 1990s.

Well-known potters Tina Garcia and Virginia Garcia were his sisters. Because their heritage was 1/2 Santa Clara and 1/2 Ohkay Owingeh, they all signed their pieces with their names plus "Santa Clara/San Juan."

A Short History of Santa Clara Pueblo

A stacked-stone building on the side of a cliff marked with the holes of former roof beams in ancient Puye, a ruin of the Santa Clara people
Ancient cliff dwellings at Puyé

Santa Clara Pueblo straddles the Rio Grande about 25 miles north of Santa Fe. Of all the pueblos, Santa Clara has the largest number of potters.

The ancestral roots of the Santa Clara people have been traced to ancient pueblos in the Mesa Verde region in southwestern Colorado. When the weather in that area began to get dry between about 1100 and 1300 CE, some of the people migrated to the Chama River Valley and constructed Poshuouinge (about 3 miles south of what is now Abiquiu on the edge of the mesa above the Chama River). Eventually reaching two and three stories high with up to 700 rooms on the ground floor, Poshuouinge was inhabited from about 1375 CE to about 1475 CE.

Drought then again forced the people to move. One group of the people went to the area of Puyé (along Santa Clara Canyon, cut into the eastern slopes of the Pajarito Plateau of the Jemez Mountains). Another group went south of there to what we now call Tsankawi. A third group went a bit to the north, following the Rio Chama down to where it met the Rio Grande and founded Ohkay Owingeh on the northwest side of that confluence.

Beginning around 1580, another drought forced the residents of the Puyé area to relocate closer to the Rio Grande. There, near the point where Santa Clara Creek merged into the Rio Grande, they founded what we now know as Santa Clara Pueblo. Ohkay Owingeh was to the north on the other side of the Rio Chama. That same dry spell forced the people down the hill from Tsankawi to the Rio Grande where they founded San Ildefonso Pueblo to the south of Santa Clara, on the other side of Black Mesa.

In 1598 Spanish colonists from nearby Yunqué (the seat of Spanish government near the renamed "San Juan de los Caballeros" Pueblo) brought the first missionaries to Santa Clara. That led to the first mission church being built around 1622. However, the Santa Clarans chafed under the weight of Spanish rule like the other pueblos did and were in the forefront of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. One pueblo resident, a mixed black and Tewa man named Domingo Naranjo, was one of the rebellion's ringleaders.

When Don Diego de Vargas came back to the area in 1694, he found most of the Santa Clarans were set up on top of nearby Black Mesa (with the people of San Ildefonso, Pojoaque, Tesuque and Nambé). An extended siege didn't subdue them but eventually, the two sides negotiated a treaty and the people returned to their pueblos. However, successive invasions and occupations by northern Europeans took their toll on the pueblos over the next 250 years. The Spanish flu pandemic in 1918 almost wiped them out.

Today, Santa Clara Pueblo is home to as many as 2,600 people and they comprise probably the largest per capita number of artists of any North American tribe (estimates of the number of potters run as high as 1-in-4 residents).

A display of the harvest at Santa Clara
After the harvest
Looking across Santa Clara Pueblo to the Rio Grande in 1920
The view across Santa Clara to the Rio Grande, 1920
Map showing the location of Santa Clara Pueblo reltaive to Santa Fe, Albuquerque and Gallup, New Mexico
The location of Santa Clara Pueblo
For more info:
Santa Clara Pueblo at Wikipedia
Pueblos of the Rio Grande, Daniel Gibson, ISBN-13:978-1-887896-26-9, Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2001
Upper photo courtesy of Einar Kvaran, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

About Jars

The jar is a basic utilitarian shape, a container generally for cooking food, storing grain or for carrying and storing water. The jar's outer surface is a canvas where potters have been expressing their religious visions and stories for centuries.

In Sinagua pueblos (in northern Arizona), the people made very large jars and buried them up to their openings in the floors of the hidden-most rooms in their pueblo. They kept those jars filled with water but also kept smaller jars of meat and other perishables inside those jars in the water. It's a form of refrigeration still in use among indigenous people around the world.

Where bowls tend to be low, wide and with large openings, jars tend to be more globular: taller, less wide and with smaller openings.

For a potter looking at decorating her piece, bowls are often decorated inside and out while most jars are decorated only on the outside. Jars have a natural continuity to their design surface where bowls have a natural break at the rim, effectively yielding two design surfaces on which separate or complimentary stories can be told.

Before the mid-1800s, storage jars tended to be quite large. Cooking jars and water jars varied in size depending on how many people they were designed to serve. Then came American traders with enameled metal cookware, ceramic dishes and metal eating utensils...Some pueblos embraced those traders immediately while others took several generations to let them and their innovations in. Either way, opening those doors led to the virtual collapse of utilitarian pottery-making in most pueblos by the early 1900s.

In the 1920s there was a marked shift away from the machinations of individual traders and more toward marketing Native American pottery as an artform. Maria Martinez was becoming known through her exhibitions at various major industrial fairs around the country and Nampeyo of Hano was demonstrating her art for the Fred Harvey Company at the Grand Canyon. The first few years of the Santa Fe Indian Market helped to solidify that movement and propel it forward. It took another couple generations of artists to open other venues for their art across the country and turn Native American art into the phenomenon it has become.

Today's jars are artwork, not at all for utilitarian purposes, and their shapes, sizes and decorations have evolved to reflect that shift.

About Undecorated Pottery

In the very beginning, ceramics were rough creations with no designs on them. They were purely utilitarian and, over time, their creation was made smoother. Several hundred years later, some potters felt their product was good enough to support decorations. Then came the search for pigments that would survive the firing process. The first successful pieces were black designs on white/grey clay, the black derived from organic sources and turning black through firing in an oxygen-reduction atmosphere. However, even fifteen hundred years after the first pots may have been decorated with carbon-based organic paint in the Southwest, some pueblo potters still produce undecorated polished wares.

For some, it is enough to smooth their pieces, then slip them with a finely ground mix of micaceous clay and water before firing. For others, their pots need to be polished extremely smooth, then fired to be their final color (usually red or black). The only embellishments the piece might have are organic openings, flared rims, tall necks, low shoulders, double-shoulders or triple-shoulders, all of which are built in during the coiling process.

Gutierrez Family Tree - Santa Clara Pueblo

Disclaimer: This "family tree" is a best effort on our part to determine who the potters are in this family and arrange them in a generational order. The general information available is questionable so we have tried to show each of these diagrams to living members of each family to get their input and approval, too. This diagram is subject to change should we get better info.


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