Made literally from land, Pueblo pottery is one of America’s most enduring art forms. The innovative exhibition Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery connects a remarkable group of Pueblo ceramics to contemporary Indigenous knowledge. 

The exhibition features more than 100 clay works with a range of forms, surface treatments, and materials. Dating from precontact to the present day, vessels and sculptures represent communities spanning from New Mexico’s Río Grande Pueblos to Ysleta del Sur in West Texas to the Hopi tribe of Arizona. 

Curated by the Pueblo Pottery Collective and organized by the School for Advanced Research and the Vilcek Foundation, the exhibition prioritizes Pueblo voices. The Pueblo Pottery Collective includes 60 individual members of diverse ages, backgrounds, and professions, who represent 21 source communities. The curators’ firsthand knowledge of pots and potters, family rituals, traditional materials, and daily use grounds viewers in a powerful sense of people and place. At the same time, a thread of ancestral memory connects individual pots to the living legacy of Pueblo peoples. 

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.

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