Santa Clara Pueblo Polished Blackware Jar with Scalloped Pie-Crust Rim

Native American, Santa Clara Pueblo (Tewa). A hand-built Pueblo jar of polished blackware. A low, swelling body turns at a crisp shoulder ridge into a tall, concave neck. The neck flares into a rim pinched all the way around into a row of soft scallops, like a pie crust crimped by a careful thumb. The potter coiled and scraped the walls, then burnished the slipped surface with a smooth stone, and the faint facets of that polishing still catch the light across the body. The black color comes from the firing, not from paint. The kiln was smothered so that carbon soaked into the clay, giving the surface its deep glossy finish. The vessel has no painted or carved decoration, so its whole effect depends on its outline and its shine. The fluted rim suggests it was perhaps made for buyers outside the pueblo rather than for use at home. Santa Clara Pueblo, known in Tewa as Kha'p'o Owingeh, sits on the west bank of the Rio Grande north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Its potters, nearly all of them women, have been known for polished black and red wares since the colonial period. Their unpainted, mirror-burnished blackware became the pueblo's signature at a time when many other Rio Grande villages were still making painted polychromes. Potters fire blackware in reduction. When the firing nears its end, the potter covers the pots and fuel with a heavy layer of finely powdered dried manure. This cuts off the oxygen and fills the kiln with smoke, so carbon is driven into the burnished surface and the clay turns from red to black. The higher the stone polish before firing, the deeper the gloss afterward. Any break in the burnishing, or any spot where too much air reached the pot, shows up as a matte or brownish patch. That makes every finished vessel a record of the potter's control over both the polishing stone and the fire. The railroad reached northern New Mexico around 1880 and brought a steady stream of travelers and curio dealers. From then on, Santa Clara potters increasingly made smaller jars, vases, and novelty shapes for this new audience alongside their large storage and water jars. Decorative rims like the scalloped edge seen here belong to that period of adaptation. Potters began signing their work regularly only in the 1920s and later, so most blackware from this period is by unnamed hands. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids. Item # 206478

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