Native American, Pottery, Ceramics 

From the back cover:

From gathering bluish clay in the mountains to painting, glazing and firing, every aspect of Pueblo ceramic art is covered thoroughly in this book. Pueblo pottery, with its pleasingly proportioned shapes and its elaborate designs, has long been regarded as one of the finest products of American Indian craftsmanship. To the author of this book, it was also the fruitful field for an important anthropological investigation. "How much room is there for individual expression in primitive art?" she asks, and she answers that question in surprising and interesting ways.

The technique of coiled clay pottery making is described in detail: mixing the clay with tempering, building the artifact out of long thin pieces, rough finishing, application of slip, and the final polishing. This is the timeless part of the craft, which has varied little since before the Spanish conquest. What has changed, and what continues to change (noticeably and sometimes even rapidly) is the decorative element - the design motifs, arrangement of the pattern, uses of color, even the quality of the workmanship. By letting native artists speak for themselves, and at the same time analyzing with a practiced eye the many types of design spread throughout the area, the author is able to convey a sense of the range of personal invention in design. She shows how the presence of a single individual can raise the quality of art in the whole community. Native artists tell how they plan designs, how they may "dream" designs, or how they may adapt them from other sources (like their own classical past). There is also a discussion of religious associations, information about instructional methods, and much else.

20 full-page plates show water jars, bowls, drums and other ceramic artifacts (both modern and classical) of the Acoma, Zuni, San Ildefonso and Hopi, and 18 further plates, most of them in two colors, reproduce over 150 design motifs - dragonflies, cloud stripes, deer house, water birds, all sorts of cloud designs, feather designs, and many more. There is a wealth of material here for the craftsman, potter, designer or commercial artist who wants to use these designs either directly or as suggestions for his own work. They are bold and lively, and can be used by themselves, or combined with each other (as the Pueblo do), in an almost unlimited variety of ways.