Telling the 'Stories Within': Exhibit showcases 18 'hidden' pieces at the Coe Center

Every piece of pottery tells a story.

Worldwide, Indigenous cultures use pottery for similar purposes. Early artisans created pieces for storing grain or gathering. Other ancient potters created works for ceremonies. Still others worked in clay solely for aesthetics. None of these intentions have changed; potters still create works for storage, ceremony and art.

Santa Fe’s Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts is showing “Stories Within,” a collection of 18 pieces from the center’s collection.

Some of the potters used traditional approaches such as the coil method to create their work. Others combine the traditional with contemporary techniques.

“A lot of them were pieces that have been hidden in our collection,” said curator Alex Peña. “It is a lot of material — over 2,500 works from all over the world.”

Instead, he narrowed down the focus to North America, ranging from New Mexico to Oklahoma.

Chickasaw artist Joanna Underwood Blackburn employs the Japanese raku method traditionally used in tea ceremonies. Raku is-hand-modeled pottery fired at a low temperature and rapidly cooled.

“That’s one of my favorite pieces because it highlights a different culture’s influences,” Peña said. “They’re still making it their own.

“She’s not traditional,” he continued. “She graduated from IAIA (the Institute of American Indian Arts), but she was by no means a Southwestern artist. The lip is kind of serrated. It appeared she did not have a perfectionist viewpoint.”

“Flight of the Pterodactyls” features soaring dinosaurs around the bowl. Andrew Pacheco of Kewa Pueblo won a youth award for the piece at the Santa Fe Indian Market.

“He was a high school student,” Peña said. “I like dinosaurs. It’s very multi-level in all the materials he used. If you look at it from certain angles, it’s definitely not perfect. There’s various slips on the piece.”

Pacheco used red slip on both the inside and outside of the pot, then added a white slip beneath the outside.

“He used Rocky Mountain beeweed for the pterodactyls,” Peña said. “The clay is actually micaceous clay.”

Alice Cling used a traditional Diné olla from clay, stone-burnished slip and covered it in piñon pitch.

“They’re more functional in form; it seals it,” Peña said.

Laguna Pueblo potter Gladys Paquin created a wave pattern on her work using natural pigments.

“They all feature some similarity in either function or form,” Peña said. “Some of them could have been for a traditional bowl or just aesthetics. Each one of them creates a story.”

The former director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, Ralph T. Coeplayed a central role in the revival of interest in Native American art, from the ancient to the modern. He amassed a collection of about 2,500 pieces, including sculpture, baskets, jewelry and moccasins.

As a 1955 art student, he was transfixed by a small Northwest coast totem pole that he spotted in a shop on Manhattan’s Lexington Avenue. It was the start of a 55-year fascination that he shared through major exhibitions he curated, his writings and eventually his donations.

Telling the 'Stories Within': Exhibit showcases 18 'hidden' pieces at the Coe Center

To gather the objects, Coe roamed from reservation to reservation in the United States and Canada, learning about their symbolism and the techniques of their artisans.

When Coe died in 2010, he left some pieces to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; the rest went to his namesake Coe Center. He lived in Santa Fe.