Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery

In partnership with the Indian Arts Research Center at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, "Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery" will be on view at the Vilcek Foundation through June 4, 2024. The exhibition features works from the Vilcek Collection and from the Indian Arts Research Center at the School for Advanced Research.

"Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery" was curated by the Pueblo Pottery Collective, a group of more than 60 Native American community members convened from the 22 Pueblo communities in the Southwest. The Collective was established in 2019 specifically to develop an exhibition that centers the voices of Native American people in the curation and display of Native American art.

“Grounded in Clay emphasizes the underlying, multifaceted, and nuanced understandings that the Pueblo Indian people of the American Southwest have of one of the more ubiquitous and resilient forms of our material culture—pottery,” writes curator Joseph Aguilar. “Historical memories and our understanding of pottery and other cultural patrimonies are tantamount to a form of Indigenous intellect—a physical, spiritual, and intellectual worldview that is inextricably linked to land, people, and history.”

"Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery" opened with a joint presentation in New York City (Lenapehoking) at the Vilcek Foundation and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Vilcek Foundation also launched "Pueblo Pottery: Stories in Clay," a digital experience to complement the exhibition of "Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery."

The Vilcek Foundation is based in New York City, which is located on the ancestral land of the Lenape people, known as Lenapehoking. The Lenape are a diasporic people that remain closely connected with this land.

We support Native American sovereignty. Awareness of historical and contemporary Indigenous exclusion and erasure and the associated traumas is critically important, and we are working to overcome the effects of Indigenous exclusion in our operations and programs.