Contemporary ceramicist Jody Folwell (Santa Clara Pueblo) always knew she was going to make art that was a bit different, even as she was learning traditional Pueblo pottery making at the kitchen table from her her mom, celebrated artist Rose Naranjo. Satirical, sculptural, social-political, and avant-garde ceramic statements line the gallery from start to finish in O’Powa O’Meng: The Art and Legacy of Jody Folwell, a celebratory retrospective exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art through September 13, 2026.
The Santa Fe stop is the final on the exhibition’s journey across the United States, which started at the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia.
2018 Ancient pot by Jody Falwell (Santa Clara Pueblo), with painting inspired by Lascaux cave painting; rim evokes fire’s importance to humanity’s art making traditions. Courtesy: private collection.
Walk through the show to see our favorites in our Flickr album.
The exhibition does not unfold chronologically, even though it features some of Jody’s (and her family’s) most ground-breaking and controversial work. At one end is Half a Step, that she credits as one of her earliest nontraditional ceramic statements, featuring a lively bison thundering around the partially polished curved surface – a “half step” away from what was expected from Santa Clara pottery at the Santa Fe Indian Market in 1975. At the other end is her collaboration with the acclaimed sculptor Bob Hazous (Chiricahua Apache) that won Best in Show in 1984. Who had ever seen a green Pueblo pot with loaded commentary?
1975 Half a Step pot by Jody Falwell (Santa Clara Pueblo) – featuring sculpted animals and an unpolished band. Courtesy: Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.
Jody’s 1984 Hero Pot collaboration with Bob Hazous (Chiricahua Apache), awarded Best in Show at that year’s Santa Fe Indian Market for its unconventional color, shape, and subject. Courtesy: private collection.
Collaborations, social commentary, sculptural details, and different painting styles encourage gallery goers to move slowly, stop, look, and circumnavigate each work to let the beauty, humor, or story sink in. Jody’s recent multi-pot ceramic installation The Cycle of Pottery is Us causes viewers to stop, think, and reflect on not only the persistence of the traditional Tewa art form, but of the entire human cycle of birth and rebirth.
Detail of Jody’s 2024 The Cycle of Pottery is Us, a sequential reference to black-and-white Ancestral Pueblo ceramic traditions, the art form’s near-loss 50 years ago, and its resurgence. Courtesy: Tia Collection.
As cultural appropriation carries a loade charge in the art world, Jody’s feels that her fascination by sinuous designs of other cultures, the cheekiness of Pop culture, and admired styles of epochs in Western art history gives her license to honor them. She incorporates Plains Indian ledger book style, Maori iconography, comic books, and even the cave paintings of Lascaux. A wide lens from her travel and studies delights visitors as she takes them on a world journey of history, art, and people.
2008 Northwest Coast Art 101 incised with a tribute to her love of fluidity of Pacific Coast design; at rear, 2006 Doh San Quah (I Stole It) painted in Plains Indian ledger style. Courtesy: private collections.
The feelilng behind the show chronicles how much the maternal ceramic making tradition means to her.
2013 Star Wars pot by daughter Susan Folwell (Santa Clara Pueblo), with images of Hopi style and cosmologies. Courtesy: Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at University of Oklahoma, Norman.
The exhibition includes a large traditional bread making bowl by her mother as well as work by her daughters and grandchildren – accomplished artists in their own right.
Jody titled her show O’Powa O’Meng (“I came here, I got here, I’m still going”) to demonstrate her continued commitment both to innovation in her art form and to inspire the next generation of contemporary artists.
Several pieces involve a mix of tiles (some broken) and pots with incriptions or depictions woven across all of them, such as The Buffalo Hunt that she created for the Santa Fe installation and Buffalo Soldier, a meditation on Obama’s historic presidency and the enslaved workers who originally built the White House.
Hear more about pushing the boundaries from inside a Tewa home dedicated to art making from Jody and daughter Susan as they talk about exhibition’s final stop with curator Jill Ahlberg Yohe at Santa Fe’s New Mexico Museum of Art.
Look up at the night sky and find patterns in the stars. You can do that, even though you’re standing inside the exhibition Makowa: The Worlds Above Us at Santa Fe’s Museum of Indian Arts and Culture through January 31, 2027. The wall-sized photo murals of day and night skies provide the backdrop to sculptures, pottery, and textiles with stylized images of stars, planets, the Sun, Moon, meteors, and changes of season.
Beautifully crafted objects and immersive photos provide contemplative spaces to consider the different types of skyward observations that Indigenous communities have made across millennia, and how stories and rituals convey this knowledge across generations.
Exhibition welcome: 2009 Evening Star ceramic sculpture by Kathleen Wall (Jemez Pueblo) – a Koshare holds stars important to celestial calendar.
Kathleen Wall’s charming Koshare holding up the Evening Star welcomes everyone to the journey. Take a look through our Flickr album to see some of our other favorites.
A mix of historic and contemporary art underscores the story behind star gazing. Tracking their slow movement across the night skies, sky watchers have long seen stars as important guides. The Ancients used petroglyph images as reminders of how to use ancestor stars for guidance – to tell time, mark seasons, and take journeys through vast desert landscapes.
Star patterns: 1930s tray woven by unknown Tohono O’ohdam artist.
2020 Star Child painting by George Toya (Jemez Pueblo), showing a star surrounded by ancestors in the night sky. Courtesy: private collection
Recent artworks suggest a range of the activity in the day and night sky. Phases of the Moon inform agricultural cycles. Planetary alignments, meteor showers, and also plane traffic are all part of night-sky viewing today. Rosemary Lonewolf’s tiny pot summarizes this dynamism nicely.
Distant worlds and a crowded sky: 1992 miniature Spaced Out jar by Rosemary Lonewolf (Santa Clara Pueblo).
2000-2001 sand painting by Joe Ben Jr. (Diné) linking phases of the Moon to planting cycles.
The curators show how traditional symbols of clouds, sky, and sky dynamics are learned, used, and adapted over the centuries by exhibiting modern woven regalia alongside ancestral Puebloan pots from Chacoan culture. It shows that abstract Indigenous symbols do not exist in a single place and time – they are used and reused.
Acknowledging the lively, changing sky: 1984 shirt with sky symbols woven by Evelyn Quintana (Okay Owingeh) with Ancestral Pueblo ceramics below.
The exhibition also takes a deep dive into how ancient architecture and landscapes across the Four Corners are used to mark cardinal directions, annual cycles, and astronomical phenomenon. Chaco’s magnificent kivas are featured in dramatic photo murals that show how a combination of architecture, horizon markers, and sunrise to mark the seasons.
Equinox and solstice: Duke Johnson’s 2022 photo of the Great Kiva Casa Rinconada at Chaco Canyon showing where the Sun rises against the landscape at key times of the year.
Aerial photographs show how buildings reflect astronomical alignments. Most visitors stand intrigued before an archaeoastronimical explanation of Chaco Canyon’s famous Sun Dagger, which transformed Fajada Butte into an observatory to mark the solstice and equinox.
Google Earth photos of Chaco Canyon National Historic Park. showing how structures are aligned to the cardinal directions – Pueblo Bonito and the Great Kiva at Casa Rinconada.
Visitor watches the Sun Dagger Explorer, a virtual experience of the archaeoastronomy site on Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon. Courtesy: Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design at Ohio State University, The Solstice Project, and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.
Best of all, visitors themselves can explore the video interactive of another Chaco site – Rock of the Sun – to experience what it’s like to interact with petroglyphs, shadows, and the skies to mark time within the year. Nearby, there’s a copy of a petroglyph (carving into stone) that archeoastronomers suggest could depict an exploding star that was visible for 3 weeks in the year 1054.
Interactive video screen that provides visitors with a virtual experience of Rock of the Sun, an archaeoastronomy site in Chaco Canyon National Historic Park.
Other sections of the exhibition focus on the animals that serve as sky messengers – bats, eagles, and other birds – and rituals that honor the four cardinal directions.
One of the key themes here is to respect the elements – not try to control them – which is emphasized brilliantly in the final fitting tribute to these scientist farmers. Phenomenon such as rain, wind, clounds, and thunder seemed unpredictable to the Ancients, so ceremonies and dances were performed to convey desire for favorable elements. Beautifully woven cotton garments, paintings, and ritual headgear are rich in layered meanings – seasonal calendars, rain, and lightning.
Take a look at generations of 20th century craft mentorship in Craft Front & Center: ConversationPieces, on view at MAD Museum through April 20, 2025. The exhibition shines a light on how innovators shaped subsequent generations of craft artists at schools and art colonies across the United States. The curators have pulled from the MAD collection to show us the work of student and teacher side by side in several disciplines – fiber arts, ceramics, and glass.
Many of the mentors either taught at or were influenced by the Bauhaus, the legendary early 20th century design incubator.
Who are the generational inspirations for Eve Biddle’s 2019-2023 tiny ceramic sculptures, New Relics?
Bauhaus students could take classes in weaving, ceramics, typography, and metalwork alongside traditional fine arts classes. They were expected to excel in their applied-arts training and mix in aesthetics learned in their fine arts classes.
Bauhaus innovator Margeurite Friedlander Wildenhain’s 1966 Square and Textured Vase
When the Nazis closed the progressive school in 1933, many German-Jewish refugee teachers and students fled, transplanting Bauhaus design and educational philosophies across the world.
MAD highlights several artists – including Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, Margeurite Friedlander Wildenhain, and Maija Grotell – who came to the United States and integrated Bauhaus practice into curriculums at Black Mountain College, the California College of Arts and Crafts, Cranbrook, and new craft workshops they began.
One of the best-known 20th century textile artists, Anni Albers is featured in the show by a fine-art “pictoral textile” made on a small handloom. At the Bauhaus, Albers she trained under master weaver Gunta Stölzl, and eventally took over as head of the textile workshop. Albers moved to Black Mountain College in North Carolina with her husband, painter Josef Albers, and was the first textile artist invited by MoMA to have a one-person exhibition.
Anni Albers’s 1959 textile Sheep May Safely Graze made on a small handloom using gauze weave technique
Anni also designed commercial textiles for Knoll for years. Her influence on the next generation of painters and textile artists was profound.
MAD features work by two fiber-arts innovators (and Albers admirers) who pushed boundaries by crafting commanding, large-scale sculptures. Sheila Hicks (who studied with Josef at Yale) and Claire Zeisel (who studied with the former Bauhaus faculty at Chicago’s IIT) are credited as the leaders of America’s textile arts movement. Tufts burst from the wall in Hicks’ piece, and Zeisel’s hovers in the center of the gallery like a shaman.
Sheila Hicks’s 1968 Dark Prayer Rug, inspired by Anni Albers and Mexican and Moroccan textile artists.
Claire Zeisler’s 1967 Red Wednesday with braid and cords twisting the sculpture’s armature
Trude Guermonprez, an unconventional materials artist known for innovations in three-dimensional weaving once worked at Berlin’s textile engineering academy; later, she consulted with industrial textile firms, as did Anni Albers.
Next to Guermonprez’s dynamic 3D hanging woven sculpture, MAD shows us a piece by Kay Sakimachi, a student who met Guermonprez in 1951 at the California College of Arts and Crafts summer craft workshop.
Guermonprez encouraged students to use latest technology, and here we see how Kay used a 1959 invention by DuPont – monofilament that’s better known today as fishing line. Kay’s woven it into an ethereal hanging sculpture.
Innovative fishing-line weaving 1968 Kunoyuki by Kay Sakimachi alongside 1962 Banner by her mentor, Trude Guermonprez.
In ceramics, MAD displays a series of vessels that transform into sculptures, starting with a modest, contained piece by Margeurite Friedlander Wildenhain, one of the first Bauhaus students and the first woman in Germany to be honored as a master potter. After emigrating to the United States in 1940, Wildenhain founded Pond Farm Workshops in Sonoma County, California ad instituted a rigorous Bauhaus instructional approach.
Frances Senska, her ceramics student, applied Wildenhain’s instructional principles to her own classes at Montana State, where student Peter Voulkos learned how to breathe new life into clay. Voulkos shashed, prodded, and poked clay, vigorously transforming the humble medium into wild, dramatic expressions.
Peter Voulkos’s 1992 stoneware Sibley, an example of his revolutionary approach to ceramic form.
Mary Ann Unger 1994 terra cotta Hoist – an approach to ceramic sculpture inspired by teacher Peter Voulkos
In turn, his UC-Berkeley student, Mary Ann Unger injected whimsey and improvisation into her sculptures, which allowed her daughter, Eve Biddle, to push it even further. MAD shows Biddle’s ingenious installation of creative ceramic geodes, trilobites, and spines crawling around the gallery wall.
Ceramics mentors even play a role in the development of America’s Studio Glass movement, which begins with Harvey Littleton, whose dad was a physicist on the first reasarch team at Corning Glass Works (he later developed Pyrex). MAD displays Harvey’s gorgeous glass arcs.
Work by student and teacher: Toshiko Takaezu’s 1995 stoneware Mist #2, part of her Moon series, with Maija Grotell’s 1953 glazed earthenware vase
On weekends, Harvey spent lots of time with his dad in the Corning lab, assuming he would follow in dad’s footsteps as a physicist at the University of Michigan. But after Harvey experienced UM art classes, he switched major. Eventually, he was specializing in ceramics under Maija Grotell at Cranbrook Academy of Art (who also taught ceramic superstar Toshiko Takaezu).
Littleton’s travels to observe the Italian glassmaking masters at Verano inspired him to apply his kiln and physics skills to experimental glassmaking. Back home, e pioneered low-temperature glass-blowing techniques that enabled glass artists to create work in studio setting and not a factory.
Littleton achievement was established the first university-based glass-blowing program at University of Wisconsin-Madison. A lucky undergraduate, Dale Chihuly, learned from the master, and the rest was history for American glass making.
Glass sculptures by teacher and student – 1983 Double Blue Arches by innovator Harvey Littleton and 1968 Wine Bottle by created by Dale Chihuly in Venice under a Fulbright Fellowship.
After receiving his MFA in ceramics at RISD, Chihuly traveled to Venice (like his mentor), and observed how the team worked together to create a finished work of glass art. In 1971, he founded Pilchuk Glass Works in Washington State, where he emphasized the collaborative, collective process. Chihuly’s own sculptural wonders emerged, plus the next generation of indigenous glass artist gained experience in collaborative expression – Tony Jojolla and Preston Singletary.
There are many more stories told in this illuminating exhibition from the MAD collection. Take a look in our Flickr album.
Tony Jojolla’s 1996-1997 Large Glass Olla, a traditional Pueblo pot made of glass at Dale Chihuly’s Pilchuk School; at right, Chihuly’s 1978 Untitled Basket
Contemporary artists say they can hear their ancestors speak across generations. All they have to do is hold their community’s ancient pots – living beings that connect them to the Earth and the people from the past who made them.
You can hear these modern and ancient voices and see ceramic masterworks in Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery, an exhibition on view the The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through January 12, 2025; continuing at the St. Louis Art Museum March 7 to September 14, 2025; and on display at the Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque from March 2026 to February 2027.
In video at Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Clarence Cruz (Okay Owingeh) reflects on a pots’s personal meaning
Clay is central to Pueblo culture, and this show is special, because it’s the first major exhibition of Pueblo pots curated entirely by the indigenous community – artists, leaders, teachers, and museum professionals.
1900 Tewa-Hopi Hno jar selected by Erin Monique Grant (Colorado River Indian Tribes); it reminded her of her Hopi family. Courtesy: Vilcek Collection.
1907-1910 bowl by Nampeyo (Tewa/Hopi) selected by her great-great-grandson artist Dan Namingha. Courtesy: SAR
New York’s Vilcek Foundation co-sponsored the community-curation project, exhibition, and project website. The organizers consulted with sixty curators from 22 pueblo communities across the Southwest to select work from the IARC collection and write about the spirit of these works. Communications weren’t always easy, since Internet service (email) is still spotty on some tribal lands.
But The Pueblo Collective’s inclusive approach to create the exhibition and catalog is now considered a template for major art institutions to work with tribal communities to convey their stories and culture to the public..
The IARC collection is legendary, spanning prehistoric to modern-day works. This video takes you inside IARC archive to meet a few of the Pueblo curators and the pots they selected:
Utilitarian vessels, ancient legacies, and intergenerational connections are themes explored in the 2023 installation at Santa Fe’s Museum of Indian Arts and Culture. The exhibition design artfully integrated the words and thoughts of the curators in, around, and above the spectacular selections. Take a look at some of our favorites in our Flickr album.
Two 19th-century Tesuque water jars: a jar chosen by artist Marita Hinds (Tesuque), who saw it on a 1980s class field trip; and one admired by potter Bernard Mora (Tesuque) for its personality and imperfections. Courtesy: SAR
In some cases, a curator chose an Ancestral Pueblo pot from the 1100s and reflected on how well it’s survived today. In other cases, a curator discovered their grandmother’s pot stored for decades within the IARC collection. What a joy to bring it out and let it breathe! Listen in….
This statement about Lonnie Vigil’s magnificent vessel by Nora Naranjo Morse says it all. The MIAC gallery space recreated a Pueblo kitchen so we can experience the environment in which most Pueblo potters create their work.
1995 micaceous clay jar made by Lonnie Vigil (Nambe) selected by Nora Naranjo Morse (Santa Clara) because it glitters like stars. Courtesy: SAR
Santa Fe’s Museum of Indian Arts and Culture’s replica of Pueblo kitchen where most pottery is created
And here’s how the Met featured Lonnie’s show-stopping work – made on his kitchen table – prominently in the American Wing entrance!
Micaceous clay jar by Lonnie Vigil (Nambe) in the show’s entrance at the Met’s American Wing. Photo by Richard Lee; courtesy: The Metropolitan Museum
The project website presents the curators’ biographies, their selections, and stories. As of 2026, the pots have toured other institutions in the United States and have come home to New Mexico. See this beautiful exhibition at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque through February 21, 2027.
Listen to the Met’s 2023 panel with five curators behind this magnificent community-curated indigenous exhibition and find out why they believe understanding the vessels’ power is important:
Once you navigate the twists and turns of one of the furthest reaches of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American Wing (past the Versailles panorama and past the Rockefeller room), you’ll come to a treasure trove of Gilded Age interior design – Aesthetic Splendors: Highlights from the Gift of Barrie and Deedee Wigmore, on view through April 18.
What did rich people in the 1880s and 1890s want? The exhibition will show you.
1880s Herter Brothers cabinet, Britcher landscape, and reproduction wallpaper evoke the Wigmore’s home
Sanford Gifford’s 1879 An Indian Summer Day in Claverack Creek
The curators pay tribute to these avid Aesthetic Movement collectors by framing these promised gifts with reproduction period wallpaper and fixtures, and it’s hard to decide where to look first.
The approach to this marvelous exhibition gives modern gallery-goers an experience of what Gilded Age interior designers had in mind – cramming foyers and drawing rooms with lush paintings, flashy techno brass furniture, Japanese-style ceramics, art pottery, and fringed upholstered seats decorated with Arts & Crafts tiles that throwback to mythical times.
The mix of styles and techniques – some old and some new – reflect a time when consumption of luxury goods ran wild with the ascension of New York City as the trading and shipping capital of the world. Many of the pieces reflect new machine-made technology mixed in with a bit of medieval nostalgia via the British Arts and Crafts movement.
Look closely at all these showstoppers in our Flickr album.
Detail of 1880 Modern Gothic cabinet by Kimbel and Cabus with tile by Minton & Co.
Although the exhibition is slightly hidden away, the landscapes appearing throughout the show provide windows to lush valleys of the Rockies (thank you, Mr. Bierstadt!), autumn colors of the Catskills, and spectacular, tranquil shorelines on Maine’s rocky coast. All are either in their original fancy frames or reproductions from the era.
Alfred Thompson Bricher’s 1899 Low Tide, Hetherington’s Cove, Grand Manan in Maine
Most of the works are oil paintings, but (in case you didn’t know) New York was also the epicenter of the movement to make watercolor paintings the equal of any fine salon work. The curators have included work by the masterful William Trost Williams, so you can enjoy a side-by-side comparison of the techniques he used to give those oil painters a run for their money. Every time we’ve visited this show, visitors simply stand transfixed, drinking in the saturated, tranquil views of the faraway.
The ceramics, cloisonné tabletops, andirons, and many large-scale pieces reflect the period’s mania for anything with a hint of Japanese or Chinese style – delicate birds flitting through bamboo and fierce dragons swirling in magical space. Designers for the upper classes were captivated by images from kimonos, scrolls, screens, and ceramics from the East and made sure that custom commissioned pieces were on trend.
Bradley & Hubbard’s 1895 phoenix andirons
Sapphire encircled by grapevines on 1910 gold and platinum Tiffany necklace
The mesmerizing beacon within the show is the spectacular array of Tiffany necklaces in the center – dramatic opals and sapphires, often encircled by intricate grapevines in gold or another nod to nature-by-design. The effect of these beauties side by side is magical, and you can imagine a Gilded Age beauty making an entrance with one of these dazzlers.
The Met just announced that its September 2022 Costume Institute exhibition would be displayed in the period rooms of the American Wing, so we’ll see if Mr. Bolton and his team deploy any period finery in the more-is-more 19th-century area.
Read more about pieces in this fantastic donation on the MetCollects blog and flip through close-ups of some the featured works.
Kick off April by choosing from many virtual museum events about the latest art shows, women’s history events, and what’s happening here! Here are just a few highlights:
On Tuesday (April 6) at 6pm, meet Julie Mehretu at the Whitney Museum’s annual Annenberg Lecture. Julie will have a conversation with the Whitney’s director about how history, architecture, cities, protest, maps, and geography have influenced her work. Her magnificent mid-career retrospective is a must-see.
Julie Mehretu’s 2003 Transcending: The New International at The Whitney
Also at 6pm, the Skyscraper Museum presents Wright and New York: The Making of America’s Architect– an illustrated talk by Anthony Alofsin on how an early visionary design for a cathedral and skyscraper set the stage for the Wright’s later success.
At 6:30pm, bring your own pint to celebrate National Beer Day in this month’s Tavern Tastings series with Fraunces Tavern Museum and Connecticut’s Keeler Tavern Museum. The gals will tell you everything you ever wanted to learn about beer in 18th century taverns.
Simone Leigh’s 2008 Cupboard VIII in Making Knowing Craft in Art at The Whitney
On Thursday (April 8) at noon, join one of the Whitney’s teaching fellows in Art History from Home: Making Knowingto discuss how four artists use the materials and methods of craft to turn the idea of “fine art” on its head. Examples that you’ll discuss are selected from artworks featured in the Whitney’s expansive, fun exhibition, Making Knowing Craft in Art, 1950 – 2019. You’ll enjoy all of the twists and turns.
At 6:30pm, join Paul Shaw at Poster House for a tour of Viennese Lettering by some of the greats of the Vienna Secession movement. Paul will show examples of innovative lettering on posters, ads, and books and explain how all of this had an impact on artists of the Sixties and Seventies. The lecture is part of a series in honor of Julius Klinger: Posters for a Modern Age, currently on view at Poster House.
Letters on Vienna’s Secessionist Building – hear more at Poster House on Thursday
At 7pm, MoMA PS1 hosts Niki de Saint Phalle and the Art of Tarot to explore tarot’s influence on modern art and why the artist was inspired to create her monumental installation in Tuscany, Tarot Garden.
Niki de Saint Phalle’s life project in Tuscany, Tarot Garden.
There’s a lot more happening this week, so check the complete schedule. Most of the events are free, but it’s always nice to add a thank-you donation.
Museum Update
This week we checked out the new modern ceramics show at the Met, Shapes from Out of Nowhere: Ceramics from the Robert A. Ellison Jr. Collection, which showcases 75 works that are promised gifts to the Met. Among the highlights – several works by celebrated ceramicist George Ohr, whose late 19th century works predate midcentury shape, form, and abstraction. Lots of fans present when we visited.
Rare George Ohr ceramics 1890–1900 in Out of Nowhere at The Met
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