be chiseled, shaped, and smoothed. Spanning
over one thousand years of artistic expression,
the installation provides a glimpse of the natural,
78
cultural, and spiritual worlds of these Native
artists from western North America.
The installation is organized into focused
groupings, facilitating an exploration of materials,
styles, and diverse artistic voices. The largest
grouping features fi fteen ceramic bowls from
the Mimbres Valley of New Mexico (fi g. 3). The
bold black-and-white designs on the inside of the
vessels look entirely contemporary, as if inspired
by the pages of a graphic novel, but the bowls
were made nearly a thousand years ago. Relatively
little is known about these ancient artists.
The Mimbres people lived in southwestern New
Mexico during the fi rst millennium AD. We do
not know what they called themselves, and the
culture is named for the river valley where the
distinctive bowls were fi rst unearthed. The fi rst
settlements in the valley date to around 550 and
by 1100 there were at least seventeen villages situated
along the Mimbres River and its tributaries.
Around 1150 a sudden and substantial shift
occurred in the Southwest: The neighboring
Chaco and Hohokam societies toppled and the
Mimbres culture either radically transformed or
collapsed as well.4
The canonical black-on-white Mimbres bowls
were made in the latter years of the culture’s existence,
between 1000 and 1150. The distinctive
designs were achieved using mineral-based pigments.
Artists coated the interior surfaces of the
bowls with a fi ne clay slip and then used yucca-fi -
ber brushes to embellish the backgrounds with a
hematite-based paint. They then fi red the bowls
in an oxygen-restricted environment, resulting
in the distinctive dichromatic palette.5 Mimbres
artists decorated their works with a wide range
of motifs: abstract, fi gurative, and occasionally
narrative. The designs reveal a keen eye for the
natural world. Representations of fl ora and fauna
abound and geometric patterns often evoke
the dramatic landscape of the Southwest: distant
ART ON VIEW