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JAMES RICHARD “RICK” DILLINGHAM (1952-1994) was one of the most accomplished, original and distinctive pottery artists in all of Southwestern history. Born in the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, Illinois, Rick moved out to New Mexico to study art and anthropology at The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque where he soon became engrossed in the history, tradition and technique of Pueblo pottery-making. Working at the University’s famed Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, he studied everything from ancient Mimbres picture bowls to the pottery of the families of the great 20th Century Pueblo pottery Matriarchs, among them Nampeyo of Hano, Maria and Julian Martinez, Margaret Tafoya and others. And, in the course of his work there as a pottery restorer, he repaired and re-assembled countless pottery vessels, experience he would later employ to great artistic effect as he did here with this remarkable piece. Rick also wrote prolifically, perceptively and significantly on the subject of Pueblo pottery in several important volumes beginning with the seminal Maxwell Museum exhibition catalog “Seven Families of Pueblo Pottery”, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1974 at the tender age of 22.

In addition to making his own unique pottery art, Rick also spent years as a highly-respected dealer in historic

Pueblo pottery in Santa Fe where he delighted in passing on his intimate knowledge to his various colleagues of

whom we were fortunate to be among, clients, friends and fellow potters among whom he was a deeply respected artist, friend, confidante and tireless promoter. He formed many lasting friendships with various Pueblo potters, among them Maria, Julian and Popovi Da Martinez, Margaret Tafoya, Polingaysi Qoyawayma, Dextra Quotskuyva Nampeyo, Lucy Lewis, Dora and Tse Pe and Virgina Ebelacker. The high esteem in which these great Pueblo potters held Rick, his person, knowledge and work was quite unprecedented. They viewed him as an artistic and creative peer. They co-operated enthusiastically and completely with his books about them and patiently answered his many questions in great detail. Dora and Tse-pe personally collected numerous pieces of his work and after his untimely death, Dextra Nampeyo made and dedicated a beautiful “Shard” style jar in a loving pottery tribute to him. Rick Dillingham’s work was also, importantly and appropriately, recently recognized in a major 2024 retrospective exhibition at The New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe entitled "Rick Dillingham: To Make, Unmake and Make Again".

“No one is a master of ceramic arts, it's just a matter of how much you can cooperate with the elements at the time. That’s a humbling sort of thing that I like to keep in mind because it gives me the freedom to experiment. I try to keep the work fresh and fairly intuitive. I keep all the processes as simple as possible to reach the results that I do. And keeping the forms simple as well –spheres, triangles, cones, rectangles –lets me get away with visual murder on the surface.

As a painter looks at a canvas, I look at a form and think how can I make it work? I calculate my process, but not my work. The juxtaposition of basic stripes, zig zags, triangles and circles on the surface looks tricky, but is not consciously set out to be a new image. When I put these things together it’s as much a surprise to me as to the viewer. Ceramic art used to be hung up on the technique rather than the “art” of the piece. I think I’ve done a lot to negate that concept.”

-Rick Dillingham

In the Dillingham ceramic lexicon, this vessel is known as a “Shard” piece in that Rick deliberately formed it, fired it and then deliberately broke it into a number of large pieces, known as pottery “Shards”, around fourteen or fifteen in this case. Both surfaces of each of the vessel's large component pieces were then individually decorated on both sides. Rick then re-fired the separate pottery "shards" in various ways and with various additions, sometimes firing them several times after all of which he then re-assembled the vessel and decorated it some more with numerous panels of gold and silver leaf and other embellishments. This fascinating and completely original method is the brilliant creative breakthrough he devised based on his extensive museum experience as a pottery restorer.

The fourteen or fifteen various large shards in this vessel look like a series of miniature Modernist presentation vignettes or small pictorial panels of the distinct colors and and contours of the landscapes and ancient pottery of the Southwest with its rich mixture of various reds, oranges, browns and yellows, greens, greys, pinks, purples and blacks all overlaid with numerous gilded gold and silver panels and its interestingly and intentionally variegated glazed and unglazed surface textures. These various colors and glazes are all part of Rick’s secret alchemy, the variety of materials he used to somewhat mysteriously refer to as his “spices” which he applied to the vessel or intentionally threw into the kiln at various stages in the firing process. For a more thorough and complete explanation of Rick's various pottery-making processes, please refer to "Cowboy Boots and Cow pies, clay and a soup spoon: the dazzling artistry of Rick Dillingham" by Maurice M. Dixon, Jr. in The Museum of New Mexico's El Palacio Magazine's Winter, 2023 issue, a link to which is available here.

The finished vessel shows at once all the beauty and expressiveness of the clay surface and form and all the

intense power, heat and alchemy of the fire which transforms it. As such, it is an absolutely gorgeous and unusually compelling piece. This unique combination of traditional techniques and ancient knowledge and a fresh, modern viewpoint and sensibility combine powerfully in Dillingham’s ceramics and are the reason they are held in such great esteem today and eagerly coveted in the collections of numerous important museums from the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum, the Los Angles Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as well as in many important private collections around the country and the world.

In his numerous writings and over the course of the personal conversations we were privileged to have with him, it was clear to see that Rick Dillingham was fully fascinated with and completely enamored by the entire process of pottery-making from the gathering and handling of the clay to the management of the firing process and the often elaborate later processes of working and reworking the pieces which he created. Dillingham literally and figuratively broke the mold with his startlingly original ceramic work, combining age-old Native American methods and ancient Japanese Raku pottery techniques with his own imagination to create a unique and daring modern body of distinctive, deeply personal work. There is an artistic energy, freshness and dynamism immediately evident in them, a certain air of familiarity, but also the distinct sense that that you have never seen this before, that new ground is being broken here. As he himself explained it, as a non-Pueblo person, he was largely freed from the creative constraints that generations of tradition and custom impose upon almost all Pueblo people. Pueblo societies are inherently conservative in nature and change when it happens, occurs only incrementally and slowly over time.

In the case of this remarkable and unprecedentedly large vessel, Dillingham managed both the building and the

firing processes in his own highly original, dramatic and spectacular manner. This piece is one of his finest and most ambitious of his so-called “Shard” vessels, extravagantly decorated inside and out. Incidentally, it’s hard to know precisely what to call this piece other than a “vessel”, its not really a jar and it’s not really a bowl, it’s really more like Star Trek’s “Starship Enterprise” spaceship or a large Southwestern landform. So we’ll just continue calling it a vessel. What it most strongly resembles in actuality in its overall shape and color palette is a large Southwestern landscape feature, a mesa or butte or other massive rock formation. Also, certain angles of the vessel evoke aerial views of the Southwestern landscape, mesas, plateaus and rivers. And very interestingly, we think that the vessel could be displayed equally well facing either upwards or downwards, communicating equivalent and powerful massiveness, solidity and majesty any way you choose to look at it.

At left, Rick Dillingham in Santa Fe, c. 1975. At center, “Seven Families of Pueblo Pottery” by Rick Dillingham, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1974. At right, Rick Dillingham at work in his studio, n.d.

Right photo source and © Moreau Gallery, St. Mary’s College exhibition announcement, New Mexico Museum of Art Archives, Rick Dillingham Collection. Photograph by Glen Short.

A magnificent and monumental pottery “Shard” Vessel by Rick Dillingham, Santa Fe, NM, 1988

The vessel measures an extraordinary and almost unprecedented 22 1/2" in length, a mere one and one half-inch shy of two feet long and it is 10" in height and 19 1/2" in depth. The vessel is in completely excellent original condition and particularly so for its now almost 37 years of age. The vessel is properly signed "Dillingham" and "12 88 3" in the artist’s usual incised cursive signature on the bottom. This means the vessel was either made on December 3rd 1988 or that it was the third pottery piece that Dillingham made in December of 1988.

The vessel also has a completely excellent provenance. It went directly from Rick Dillingham’s hands into the caring and knowing hands of one of his original and most knowledgable and important gallery representatives, Garth Clark of the former Clark and Del Vecchio Gallery of Los Angeles, New York City and London who represented many important modern ceramic artists including Rick Dillingham for well over 20 years.

This monumental ceramic vessel is an exceptional and evocative very significant and highly-accomplished major Modern artwork by an extremely talented and very special ground-breaking artist who died tragically far too young at only 42 years of age. If he could make such a complete masterwork as this outstanding piece at the tender age of only 36, we can only imagine what kind of extraordinary masterpieces he might still be making today.

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Provenance:

The Artist

Garth Clark, Clark and Del Vecchio Gallery, New York, NY

Private Collection

Fine Arts of the Southwest, Santa Fe, NM

Above, the beautiful Southwestern land form of Enchanted Mesa at Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico.

Photo source and © Wikipedia