Priscilla Namingha Nampeyo (1924 - 2008) was a Hopi-Tewa potter who was known for her traditional

pottery Pottery is the process and the products of forming vessels and other objects with clay and other raw materials, which are fired at high temperatures to give them a hard and durable form. The place where such wares are made by a ''potter'' is al ...

. Namingha mined her own clay and created her own pigments for her large pots. Her work is in the collection of several museums and cultural centers.

Early life

Priscilla Namingha was born in 1924, was Hopi-Tewa and lived in Polacca, First Mesa. Namingha was the oldest daughter of Rachel Namingha and sister of

Dextra Quotskuyva Dextra Quotskuyva Nampeyo (September 6, 1928 – February 2019) was a Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Native American potter and artist. She was in the fifth generation of a distinguished ancestral line of Hopi potters. In 1994 Dextra Quotsk ...

, Lillian Gonzales and Elenor Lucas, all of whom were potters. She is a great-granddaughter of potter, Nampeyo. Priscilla Namingha's daughters also went on to become potters. Namingha stated that she learned to create pottery by watching her mother work. As a girl, she also learned pottery techniques from Nampeyo. Namingha kept making pottery almost up to her death in 2008.

Work

Namingha's work is part of the Nampeyo family tradition of pottery making. Her

uses "fine-line" decorations and incorporates patterns based on birds and feathers. Namingha used about 20 of the traditional designs created by Nampeyo. The traditional meanings of the designs however, had been lost by the time Namingha's mother was incorporating these patterns and symbols. Her pots are large, often around 20 inches or more in

diameter In geometry, a diameter of a circle is any straight line segment that passes through the centre of the circle and whose endpoints lie on the circle. It can also be defined as the longest Chord (geometry), chord of the circle. Both definitions a ...

. Namnigha used

clay Clay is a type of fine-grained natural soil material containing clay minerals (hydrous aluminium phyllosilicates, e.g. kaolinite, ). Most pure clay minerals are white or light-coloured, but natural clays show a variety of colours from impuriti ...

mined from the First Mesa and processed it by grinding the hard clay and adding ground

sandstone Sandstone is a Clastic rock#Sedimentary clastic rocks, clastic sedimentary rock composed mainly of grain size, sand-sized (0.0625 to 2 mm) silicate mineral, silicate grains, Cementation (geology), cemented together by another mineral. Sand ...

to the mixture. Black paint for the decorations is made from the Rocky Mountain bee plant and yellow rock for the reddish color in the designs. She painted with a

yucca ''Yucca'' ( , YUCK-uh) is both the scientific name and common name for a genus native to North America from Panama to southern Canada. It contains 50 accepted species. In addition to yucca, they are also known as Adam's needle or Spanish-bayon ...

brush. She fired her pottery in the ground, first burning wood into

charcoal Charcoal is a lightweight black carbon residue produced by strongly heating wood (or other animal and plant materials) in minimal oxygen to remove all water and volatile constituents. In the traditional version of this pyrolysis process, ca ...

and then laying around 8 to 10 pots on top of the coal and added sheep dung. Between the pots, she placed pot shards and rocks, for air circulation, and then more sheep dung on top. Then the pots would smolder in the fire pit for several hours. Namingha has done pottery demonstrations and shown her work at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology. She also has work in the collections of the Morgan Collection of Southwest Pueblo Pottery, the

Heard Museum The Heard Museum is a private, not-for-profit museum in Phoenix, Arizona, United States, dedicated to the advancement of American Indian art. It presents the stories of American Indian people from a first-person perspective, as well as exhibitio ...

, the Hopi Cultural Center Museum, and the Museum of Northern Arizona.

References

Sources

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External links

360 degree view of pottery
{{DEFAULTSORT:Namingha, Priscilla 1924 births 2008 deaths Hopi-Tewa potters American potters Ceramists from Arizona Native American women potters Native American potters American women potters 20th-century American artists 20th-century American women artists 20th-century American ceramists 20th-century Native American artists 21st-century Native American artists 20th-century Native American women 21st-century Native American women Native American people from Arizona Hopi women artists Hopi artists