101 Facing page, top to bottom FIG. 1: Bowl (deer in geometric landscape). Mimbres, New Mexico. C. 1010–1130. Earthenware with pigment. D: 27 cm. Gift of the Thomas W. Weisel Family to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2013.76.168. FIG. 2: Bowl (rabbit). Mimbres, New Mexico. C. 1010–1130. Earthenware with pigment. D: 27.5 cm. Gift of the Thomas W. Weisel Family to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2013.76.152. FIG. 3: Bowl (opposing deer). Mimbres, New Mexico. C. 1010–1130. Earthenware with pigment. D: 27.5 cm. Gift of the Thomas W. Weisel Family to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2013.76.86. This page FIGS. 4a and b: Vessel attributed to Nampeyo (c. 1860–1942). Hopi-Tewa, Arizona. C. 1890–1910. Earthenware with polychrome. D: 39 cm. Gift of the Thomas W. Weisel Family to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2013.76.35. archy. They made their ceramics for both daily and ritual uses. Many were placed in burials, and some were further marked with “kill holes,” broken openings broadly understood to be symbolic portals between this world and that of the spirits (figs. 1–3). The proposal that it is possible to identify individual Mimbres artists was offered in 1983 by Tony Berlant, an artist who had developed a great passion for the arts of the Southwest in the late 1960s. Berlant suggested that “only through extended contact and connoisseurship will we begin to recognize individual painters,” and he was the first to name two such Mimbres artists, the Rabbit Master and the Polychrome Priest Painter. In recent years, Berlant and Mimbres specialist Steven LeBlanc have developed a variety of ways to refine their attributions, including working with contemporary potters to discover what they can perceive that less practiced eyes may miss. LeBlanc avers that the goal is not attribution in and of itself but rather identification of “patterns of behavior” that could indicate how painters operated in Mimbres society at any given time, potentially providing insights into their relative social status as a group and into the relationships between individual styles and the overall Mimbres style. The object-based approach articulated by LeBlanc and Berlant led them to conclude that a very small number of artists were practicing in the Mimbres tradition at any given time. Intriguingly, this idea dovetails with the archaeological argument that it is possible to perceive shifts in Mimbres “microstyles” that correlate to human generations,
untitled
To see the actual publication please follow the link above