ART on view
106
MIMBRES
Visionary Painting at LACMA
By Sebastian Miller
The remarkable painted pottery
bowls from the prehistoric Mimbres culture of
the American Southwest have been a familiar
and compelling sight in books, museums, and
private collections since they began to be unearthed
in the early twentieth century. These
visually striking ceramics are slipped in white
and painted with distinctive black designs, sometimes
fi gurative but more frequently intricate and
graceful geometric patterns, often surrounding
a central white void. Exquisite examples of
this tradition are the subject of Decoding
Mimbres Painting: Ancient Ceramics from
the American Southwest, an exhibition on
view at the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art until December 2, 2018. The fi fty
one bowls in the installation include
many iconic masterpieces, but each
was carefully selected to elucidate the
innovative and original research about
the painted iconography, the product
of years of consideration and study by
Los Angeles–based artist Tony Berlant
and art historian Evan Maurer, who is
also director emeritus of the Minneapolis
Institute of Art.
As background, the Mimbres culture
was a subgroup of the larger Mogollon
culture, one of the three major cultural divisions
of the prehistoric Southwest, the others
being the Hohokam to the west and the Anasazi
(increasingly referred to as Ancestral Pueblo)
to the north. The Mimbres were centered to
the west of modern-day Las Cruces, New Mexico,
living along the Mimbres River and the Rio
Grande, as well as the upper reaches of the Gila
River on the other side of the Continental Divide.
The term Mimbres is derived from the Spanish
term mimbre, a reference to the small willows