REVIVING AN ART FORM
REVIVING A CULTURE
BY HARLAN MCKOSATO J
oshua Madalena made a hard choice in the early 1990s. An accomplished potter and religious and political leader from the Pueblo of Jemez in New Mexico, he decided to devote
himself to reviving his people’s ancestral black-on-white ceramics. The art form had been lost for nearly
three centuries. But after a decade of experi- mental efforts, he successfully rediscovered the process. Madalena believes that the unique Jemez
ceramic pottery is the original art form of his Jemez people (pronounced hey-mess). “It is the pottery of the ancestors. It was the domi- nant art form of the Jemez people for 400 years, and survived without change during that time,” says Madalena. But when he started his quest, he said, “There was no memory from anyone (within the Jemez community) that I could use as a resource.” This unique pottery is tempered with
volcanic tuff or rock, slipped with white clay, painted with carbon (vegetable) paint and fired in an oxygen-free atmosphere. Archae- ological findings show that the pottery was 14 AMERICAN INDIAN SUMMER 2015
used from about 1300 to 1700 A.D. through- out the Jemez Mountain range and sur- rounding areas, before being extinguished by Spanish occupation of what is now modern- day New Mexico. “Contemporary art changes from one gen-
eration to the next, but Jemez black-on-white pottery didn’t change for 400 years,” says Madalena. “These vessels were created from miniatures all the way to giant form. “Our pottery had been gone for 300 years.
It needed to be reborn because I needed to find the identity of our people. I needed to find where I stood in this world and where my place was on Earth during these times,” says Madalena, a trained archaeologist. “This cul- ture, these stories, needed to be brought back.” But recovering the process was an arduous
and frustrating task, he recalls. “I started visit- ing museums and collections in Santa Fe and throughout the Southwest in the early 1990s. We had to find the right clay and plants, how long to boil them and so on.
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ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF JOSHUA MADALENA
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