Grounded in Clay The Museum of Fine Arts Houston

Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery offers a visionary understanding of Pueblo pots as vessels of community-based knowledge and personal experience. Highlighting Pueblo voices and aesthetics, this traveling exhibition marks the first Native-curated exhibition on view at the MFAH. The presentation features more than 100 historical, modern, and contemporary items in... Show more

Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery offers a visionary understanding of Pueblo pots as vessels of community-based knowledge and personal experience. Highlighting Pueblo voices and aesthetics, this traveling exhibition marks the first Native-curated exhibition on view at the MFAH. The presentation features more than 100 historical, modern, and contemporary items in clay.

Although Pueblo pottery has long been exhibited within the context of Eurocentric time lines and Western concepts of art and history, Grounded in Clay gives voice to the Pueblo Pottery Collective, a group of more than 60 individual members of 21 tribal communities who selected and wrote about artistically and culturally distinctive pots from two significant Pueblo pottery collections: the Indian Arts Research Center of the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Vilcek Foundation in New York City.

The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery combines individual voices from Native communities where pots have been made and used for millennia into an Indigenous group narrative. The approach illuminates Pueblo history and contemporary life, redefining concepts of Native art, history, and beauty from within, and challenging stereotypes about Native peoples.