Pueblo pottery exhibition opening in March at SLAM 

ST. LOUIS, Dec. 18, 2024—Birthed from the land and shaped by a millennium of skillful hands, Pueblo pottery is one of America’s most enduring art forms. An exhibition of more than 100 clay works will be on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum this spring.

Curated by the Pueblo Pottery Collective and organized by the School for Advanced Research and the Vilcek Foundation, “Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery” opens at SLAM on March 21. The free exhibition remains on view through Sept. 14 in Gary C. Werths and Richard Frimel Galleries 248 and 249. 

Recently featured at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Grounded in Clay” connects these Pueblo ceramics with contemporary Indigenous knowledge. The Pueblo Pottery Collective includes 60 individual members of diverse ages, backgrounds and professions, who represent 21 Pueblo communities. The curators’ firsthand knowledge of pots and potters, family rituals, ancestral and innovative materials, and daily use grounds viewers in a sense of people and place. 

The exhibition features works from the precontact era to the present with vessels and sculptures made with a range of forms, materials and surface treatments. They represent communities spanning from New Mexico’s Río Grande Pueblos to Ysleta del Sur in West Texas to the Hopi tribe of Arizona. Pottery in the exhibition comes from the renowned collections at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe and the Vilcek Foundation in New York.  

“Grounded in Clay” builds on a strength in Southwest Native art at the Saint Louis Art Museum. In the past few years, new installations in the museum’s collection galleries brought on view a greater number of Southwestern ceramics from the museum’s collection than previously displayed, expanding the stories that the museum shares about Indigenous art of the Southwest and complementing recent exhibitions that have focused on historic textiles and modern painting from the region.   

The exhibition will open with a March 21 program featuring Nora Naranjo Morse, an artist and member of the Pueblo Pottery Collective who lives and works in Northern New Mexico. A series of programs will follow. For more information on events, visit slam.org/events. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue, featuring essays by each member of the Pueblo Pottery Collective. 

“Grounded in Clay” is a collaborative exhibition curated by the Pueblo Pottery Collective, organized by the School for Advanced Research and the Vilcek Foundation, and hosted by the Saint Louis Art Museum. The School for Advanced Research, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit educational institution, was established in 1907 to advance innovative social science and Native American art. Its 15-acre residential campus sits on ancestral lands of the Tewa people in O’gah’poh geh Owingeh or Santa Fe, New Mexico.  The Vilcek Foundation raises awareness of immigrant contributions in the United States and fosters appreciation of the arts and sciences. 

CONTACT: Molly Morris, 314.655.5250, molly.morris@slam.org