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Above left, Polingaysi Qoyawayma documented her extraordinary life in a very interesting and powerful book, "No Turning Back”, published by The University of New Mexico Press in 1964. It is the story of a young Hopi girl's struggle to bridge the gap between the ancient traditional world of her people and the modern world of the white man. Above right, Polingasysi demonstrating pottery-making, c. 1957.
Above right photo source and © University of New Mexico Press
“I tell the young people this: Evaluate the best there is in your own culture and hang onto it, for it will be foremost in our life; but do not fail to take the best from other cultures to blend with what you already have. Don't set limitations on yourself. If you want more and still more education, reach out for it without fear. You have in you the qualities of persistence and endurance. Use them.”
-Polingaysi Qoyawayma
A particularly beautiful and extremely rare Hopi plainware pottery “Corn Ear” jar by Polingaysi Qoyawayma, a.k.a. Elizabeth Q. White, c. 1960’s-70’s
One of the most fascinating, impressive and influential figures in the long history of the American Southwest is the renowned Hopi educator, author and highly-accomplished pottery artist, Polingaysi Qoyawayma (1892-1990) or Elizabeth
Q. White, as she was later known. Her original given Hopi name beautifully translates to "Butterfly sitting among the flowers in the breeze”.
Over the course of her extraordinarily eventful long life of 98 years, Polingaysi witnessed firsthand and was part
of a massive cultural change at Hopi and across the greater Southwest. She herself lived astride and intimately experienced two completely disparate cultures, first that of the traditional Hopi Indians and next that of the Christian white Americans before returning to a somewhat changed Hopi. Polingaysi’s Father worked for Mennonite missionary,
Henry R. (H.R.) Voth, who built a mission school in Oraibi village on Third Mesa in 1893 and attempted without a great
deal of success to convert Hopis to Christianity. In 1906, Polingaysi was sent away from her Hopi homeland to be educated at The Sherman Institute in Riverside, California after which she went to live with a Mennonite family in Newton, Kansas and to receive missionary training at Bethel College. This is when her name was changed to “Elizabeth”,
a name which she retained for the rest of her life.
After this, around 1914, she returned to Hopi to work as a teacher, a position in which she served with great distinction for the next four decades until she retired in 1954 at which point she made a complete U-turn in life and became an
artist and a uniquely skilled and creative potter. Polingaysi studied ceramics with the renowned Hopi ceramicist, painter and jeweler, Charles Loloma (1921-1991), who taught pottery making classes at Arizona State University in Phoenix
and The University of Arizona in Tucson. Under Loloma’s tutelage and with his inspiration she developed a unique and highly-distinctive style of plainware Hopi pottery often using a pinkish-colored clay and making wonderful organic
forms which always have a distinctly spare Modern look and unique feel.
At above center, a Charles Loloma ceramic plainware cylinder jar with incised Hopi Corn Maiden motifs, c. 1950’s. Could this ceramic piece or another one like it made by Polingaysi's pottery teacher have been the original inspiration for Polingaysi’s later ceramic jars with corn ear appliqué designs? At above left, a Hopi farmer in his field harvesting an ear of corn. At right, a Hopi woman grinding corn for the Hopi wafer bread known as "Piki".
"In ceremonies, the use of corn and corn symbols seem endless. Corn meal is a symbol of fertility and friendship, and also serves as ceremonial body makeup. Corn stalks are used during kachina ceremonies and corn husks in the making of pahos and parts of various ceremonial dress. An ear of corn will be placed with a newborn baby, symbolizing a spiritual relationship with the Earth, and one is given to each child at the time of initiation. Ears of corn also are carried by kachina dancers and are used extensively in a host of other ceremonies. Corn pollen, itself, is used symbolically in christenings, and young Hopi girls grind corn for four days as part of their initiation into womanhood. Symbols of corn appear on garments, headpieces and wands used during ceremonies and on altars."
-Quotation source and © "The Miracle of Hopi Corn", Arizona Highways Magazine, January 1978
The jar measures a nicely-sized 9” in height and it is 7” in width at its widest shoulder point. It is very precisely and properly signed “Polingaysi” in her customary, bold, incised signature on the bottom. The jar has a really marvelous and completely sensuous highly stone-polished surface all over its entire rich rosy peachy clay body which literally glows
and adds immeasurably to its extraordinary visual impact as a completely precious three-dimensional ceramic sculptural piece. The jar is in excellent original condition with no cracks, no chips and no restoration in evidence under a thorough Ultra-violet light examination.
The exceptional beauty and uniqueness of this plainware pottery vessel is a real testament to Polingaysi’s abilities; the artistry and technical skill involved in elevating Plainware pottery which had generally been always previously viewed as being a much more utilitarian, much less refined form of Hopi pottery, suitable only for bread-making Piki dough bowls and water carrying canteens into the exalted realm of a distinguished work of Modern fine art.
In an interesting sidebar, Polingaysi was joined in this artistic elevation and celebration of Hopi plainware pottery by her fellow, contemporary Hopi potters, the talented sisters, Garnet Pavatea (1915-1981) and Myrtle Young (1904-1984) who also achieved in their wonderful Hopi plainware “Piki” bowls a similar kind of kind of artistic refinement and recognition that Polingaysi achieved here with this superb jar. And in terms of artistic recognition, Polingaysi was awarded both the Arizona Indian Living Treasure citation and the Heard Museum in Phoenix’s Gold Medal in 1978. In 1991, the year after her death, she was posthumously inducted into the Arizona Women’s Hall of Fame.
As we previously mentioned, due to her brief pottery-making career and relatively tiny output, Polingaysi’s pottery pieces are among the rarest of the rare and are very difficult, if not nearly impossible to come by. This exceedingly rare and lovely vessel is a very special and marvelous prize indeed, the product of the fertile mind and skilled hands of an extraordinary and resilient individual possessed with an incredible life story and a uniquely fine artistic inspiration
and cultural sensibility.
SOLD
The clay was always left unadorned, unpainted and unslipped in her vessels, but she sometimes used corrugation and occasionally added molded raised bas-relief designs on her pottery pieces, as on this jar. Polingaysi’s pottery is extremely rare and difficult to come by due to the fact that she made so very few vessels in her fairly short pottery-making career at the end of her life. This jar is only the fourth Polingaysi pottery piece as well as the only jar of hers that we have ever had in our 35-plus years of enthusiastically buying, selling and collecting Hopi pottery. By comparison, in that same time period, we have had over 100 historic vessels by the great historic Hopi pottery Matriarch, Nampeyo of Hano whose vessels are also considered to be fairly rare.
Polingaysi’s pottery began a modern Hopi pottery-making dynasty which continues forward to this day. Her natural clay and molded bas-relief pottery designs such as the corn ears on this jar have provided the direct inspiration for a number of later Hopi potters, most notably her talented nephew, Al Qoyawayma, and Iris Youvella Nampeyo.
This lovely jar is a prime and picture perfect example of Polingaysi’s distinguished work. It displays the simplicity, austerity and discipline of the Hopi lifeway and highlights the incredible and indispensable significance of Corn to the Hopi way of life. It is frugal and spare in its design—being perfectly plain—only simply adorned with its two large applied and incised corn ears. Although Polingaysi seemed to diverge from traditional Hopi customs as a girl, it seems that she always somehow retained the belief in their fundamental logic and rightness.
