Navajo pottery

Lorraine Williams

Lorraine Williams has been making pottery in the traditional Navajo method with unique designs since 1980. She was featured, along with other famous women potters, in Susan Peterson’s book Pottery by American Indian Women/ The Legacy of Generations. As a result of this book, an exhibit showcasing pottery by these famous women, which included works by Lorraine, recently toured leading museums across the United States. Lorraine was also invited to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. to demonstrate traditional pottery making. She has also won awards at the prestigious Santa Fe and Heard Museum Indian Markets.

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Item - # 40139
Size -8" dia. x 10" ht.
Price - $975

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Bear Claw Vase	Seed Jar	Vase

Item - # 49138
Size -3 1/2" dia. x 3"ht.
Price - $185

Item - # 49118
Size -3 1/2" dia. x 2 1/2" ht
Price - 185

Item - # 49102
Size -3 1/2" dia. x 4 1/4"ht.
Price - $195

Alice Cling

Alice Cling was born around 1946 in a Hogan at Cow Springs in the Tonalea section of Arizona. She learned how to make pottery from her mother, Rose Williams, an innovative Navajo potter. The chemistry of the clay body and the clay slip, the atmosphere in the fire, and the ash that falls onto the pots from the juniper wood combine to produce the red-orange-purple-brown-black blushes that enhance the unusual veneer of Alice’s pots. She applies a light coating of warm pitch to the warm pots after firing and burnishes that down to a distinctive low sheen. Usually her pots are totally undecorated except for the natural pigmentation from the clay and fire. Many traditional Navajo storage jars have a biyo, a beaded necklace around the shoulder of a vessel made from a textured coil of the same clay. Alice does not like to use decoration because her grandmother disapproved of using traditional designs on non-utilitarian wares. Instead, she allows the beautiful pigmentation to serve as the decoration, thus forging an original path for the works she creates.

Several of Alice’s jars were chosen by Joan Mondale for use in the vice president’s house in Washington, D.C. Alice has also taken numerous awards at Flagstaff and Santa Fe Indian fairs and powwows. Her work is unmistakably Navajo but has flair that sets it apart from any other Indian pottery being produced today.

Item - #45117 - 5 '' dia. x 5'' ht.
Price- Sold