The Maxwell Museum of Anthropology is proud to present a new temporary exhibit, Coiling Kin: The Life of Pueblo Pottery, which presents a comprehensive exhibit of its permanent collection explored through Pueblo artists’ perspectives. It is co-curated by Dr. Lea McChesney, former Curator of Ethnology at the Maxwell Museum, and twenty-three potters from fourteen Pueblos.
Join us for its Opening Reception in which we will host a panel of co-curators who will discuss their roles in the exhibit, while others will provide small group tours of each of the four exhibit sections. Refreshments will be served (while supplies last).
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Coiling Kin: The Life of Pueblo Pottery, presents a comprehensive exhibit of its permanent collection explored through Pueblo artists’ perspectives. This collaboratively curated exhibit presents Pueblo perspectives on pottery informed by their guiding beliefs, communities, histories, and enduring practice of this art. Twenty-three potters from fourteen Pueblos selected 70 works from the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology’s permanent collection for its first comprehensive display. Contributions from additional Pueblo artists, photographs, and loan items facilitate reflections on the deep significance of clay in Pueblo life.
Pueblo peoples’ long habitation of the land is marked with the traces of pottery that record both their deep histories in the Southwest and current lives. Through the voices of the co-curators, this exhibition provides a multi-vocal experience of clay – a cherished offering of Mother Earth – from its raw to worked forms by means of their respectful use of it. We present the materials and laborious processes entailed in making pottery infused with potters’ deep spiritual beliefs and dedicated efforts. We intend visitors to experience clay as a medium for protection and nurturance, an embodied expression of their identity and integrity in and through time, and an enduring, distinguished art form that remains part of everyday life.
Over the course of three years, these artists visited the Maxwell Museum to review the museum’s collection and make preliminary selections; they refine their selections and discuss them on videotape; and hold small group and whole team meetings. In the second year, artists convened collectively on the UNM campus to begin developing themes and content. Later that summer museum staff and a videographer traveled to their communities to document these artists at work. A final group meeting the following year completed the exhibit’s organization and content in preparation for its design. Near constant communication facilitated a remarkably smooth process and warm, respectful relationships in this expansive effort of relational curation.
Presented in the round and with extensive use of audio-visual materials, the exhibit introduces the Pueblo artist co-curators and is organized around four themes: Pottery in Pueblo Life; The Living Ways of Pottery Teaching; Working Together, Shaping a Life: The Process of Pottery Making; and Keeping Our Culture Alive: Changing Traditions and Pottery Futures. Through this exhibit visitors will experience the embodied language of Pueblo pottery in all its complexity.
