Acoma Pueblo Low Profile Pottery Jar with Nampeyo Hopi Sikyatki Revival Style Designs

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A unique Acoma Pueblo low-profile pottery jar with Nampeyo Hopi Sikyatki-Revival style designs, c. 1920’s

Did the renowned Hopi pottery matriarch Nampeyo ever make pottery 200 miles away from her Hopi home at the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico? If she ever did, this piece is precisely what she might have made, a classically formed and painted “Hopi” low-profile-style, flat-top “seed” jar made completely with Acoma Pueblo materials using Nampeyo’s Hopi forms and design motifs.

There’s an old saying that if something looks like a duck, acts like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is

a duck. This jar looks like a Nampeyo, acts like a Nampeyo and quacks like a Nampeyo, but it’s definitely an Acoma Pueblo jar, not a Hopi jar. Which leads one to believe that either Nampeyo did some kind of heretofore unknown artistic residency at Acoma or some unknown Acoma potter in the 1920’s liked Nampeyo’s work so much she made her own version, perhaps inspired by being shown an actual Nampeyo jar or photo of one by an enterprising local Indian trader.

This would be the most likely possibility in our minds.

There is nothing in Acoma pottery history or tradition to include jars of this configuration or design and there is

plenty in abundance in Hopi history. The ancestral Hopi Kayenta flat top jars from 1000-1300 A.D. and the later Hopi Sikyatki-Period (1375-1625 A.D.) Low-profile jars are all places where Nampeyo drew her pottery inspirations and examples helping to spearhead the so-called Sikyatki-Revival of the late 19th Century at Hopi such as the examples pictured below.

Four-part design fields with paired bilateral symmetry like those on this jar and the Sikyatki and Nampeyo jars seen above were common in the Sikyatki-era and Nampeyo adopted, interpreted and re-interpreted them over the years as her own, but this was not the case at Acoma Pueblo which has its own outstanding ancient pottery tradition that distinctly does not include pieces like this. The designs on the jar are most beautifully painted in black and red paint against the traditional Acoma bright white slip, but done completely in the Nampeyo style, with a red square around the jar's circular opening from which descends a four-part bilaterally symmetrical design completely with the exact same type of intentional idiosyncrasies Nampeyo often included in her generally symmetrical design executions.

Above left, a Nampeyo "Eagletail" jar, c. 1900-1910, with four-part bilaterally opposed design. At center, a Nampeyo black-on-yellow "seed" jar, 6 1/4" diameter, c. 1900 with four-part, bilaterally opposed design. At right, an original Hopi Sikyatki Polychrome “low-profile” jar, c. 1500-1550 A.D., with four-part, bilatereally opposed design.

So where precisely does this piece fit in to the overall continuity of historic Pueblo pottery? It’s a historic Pueblo oddity to be sure, possibly commissioned by an enterprising Anglo Indian trader or just made by a curious and adventurous Acoma potter who saw a photo os somethinrg in a book or who saw an actual piece of Nampeyo’s either

at Hopi or at Acoma or in a nearby trading post.

The jar measures a nicely-sized 5 1/4" in diameter and is 1 1/2" in height. It is in good original condition with no cracks or chips, but it has a substantial amount of abrasion wear around the rim and some on the shoulder. A through examination of the vessel under Ultraviolet light reveals no evidence of restoration or overpainting.

This unique jar is both a beautiful piece of rare and historic pueblo pottery and a mystery wrapped in an enigma

all at once. You can be the only one on your block or perhaps your entire country to own a piece like this.

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