Pueblo Pottery and the Pueblo Pottery Fund.

Panel Discussion — Speakers: Bruce Bernstein, Panel Discussant, with artists Russell Sanchez and Milford Nahohai. Panelists will discuss the roots of the Pueblo Pottery Fund, founded in 1922 and incorporated three years later as the Indian Arts Fund. The talk will focus on the Fund’s impact on those collecting Native American art and its effect on the lives of the artists and their descendants.

Bruce Bernstein is considered one of the leading authorities on Southwestern Native American art. Bernstein received his doctorate in anthropology from the University of New Mexico in 1993. A trained ethnologist, he has worked as a curator and museum director both in Santa Fe and Washington, DC. He currently serves as executive director of Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts in Santa Fe. His numerous publications include Santa Fe Indian Market: A History of Native Arts and the Marketplace (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2012).

Russell Sanchez is a renowned potter from San Ildefonso Pueblo where he conscientiously and insightfully continues the long traditions of innovative pottery from his village. Russell’s work is found in private and public collections throughout the United States. With winning a prize for his first entry into Indian Market at age eight, he clearly indicated his abilities and intentions of becoming one of the most important potters of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He learned pottery making from the matriarchs of his village.

Milford Nahohai is from Zuni Pueblo. His mother, Josephine Nahohai, was the 1985-1986 Katrin H. Lamon Fellow in Native American Art and Education, one of SAR’s first artist fellows. Josephine and her olla maiden sisters danced the Zuni ollas back to life during their fellowship at SAR. Studying older pottery solidified Josephine’s memories, strengthening the family’s resolve to return Zuni pottery to its traditional forms.

Presentations and panel discussions will take place at St. Francis Auditorium at 107 West Palace Ave. at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

To register for this event please click here.

Special tours of SAR’s Indian Arts Research Center’s collections of nearly 12,000 items of Southwestern Native American art, including pottery, textiles, basketry, jewelry, carvings and more, will be available for the first 30 registrants. To register for these special tours, click here. Fee for non-members is $15; free to members. To join SAR, click here. For more information on these special tours and other tours, please call or email Daniel Kurnit at 505-954-7272 or at kurnit@sarsf.org

This program is presented in partnership with the New Mexico Museum of Art in honor of their centennial celebration, SAR’s 110th anniversary, and the 40th anniversary of the Indian Arts Research Center (IARC) at SAR.

Funding for this program is provided in part by a grant from the New Mexico Humanities Council.