At 82, Jody Folwell has been thinking about the history of Santa Clara Pueblo pottery. That stands to reason. She helped to make it. And to break it.
In the powerful O’Power O’Meng exhibition, on view in Cargill Gallery through Jan. 26, we see Folwell’s brilliant mind at work, propelled by a restless experimental spirit, wrapped in a fearless approach to art and a devotion to her Santa Clara community.
“For more than 50 years, Folwell has remained committed to the vessel form as the place for her boundless innovations,” Jill Ahlberg Yohe and her two fellow exhibition curators write in O’Powa O’Meng: The Art and Legacy of Jody Folwell catalog.
“Through her pots, this exhibition reveals a daring artist who is continually experimenting with novel technical approaches, shapes, sizes, firing methods, and materials; an artist who fearlessly uses pottery as a platform for political and social commentary – acts that were seen as radical when she started and which are now emulated by younger artists; and an artist whose vessels include visual metaphors for personal experiences and biographical narratives of her relations, both human and animal,” the curators write.
That the show exists is a tribute to Ahlberg Yohe’s determination to credit a marginalized giant of an artist whose revolutionary approaches changed the course of Native American pottery and, as she argues in the catalog, the very course of avant-garde American art.
Ahlberg Yohe met Folwell in 2015 in the thick of preparations for the ground-breaking Hearts of Our People exhibition and proposed a retrospective. Folwell was game. The artist has retained some seminal works. But finding other key pieces, now widely dispersed, was far harder. Nine years later, the curators have assembled more than three dozen of her iconic pieces and combined them with works by her mother, famed potter Rose Naranjo, daughters Susan Folwell and Polly Rose Folwell, and granddaughter Kaa Folwell.
Running Wolves, 2005 • Jody Folwell and Susan Folwell • Clay, paint
Collection of Susan Ratzkin, Thousand Oaks, CA
Folwell grew up in the village of Santa Clara in the 1940s and ’50s, the sixth of 10 children (eight of them biological), in the renowned Naranjo pottery family. She was surrounded by a community of potters and learned by watching, then doing. Folwell was creative, but so relentlessly restless that the family nicknamed her “Wotsi,” the Tewa word for wanderer.
“Her parents instilled in all of the 10 kids, ‘Go do something. Be significant. Make an impact in the world,’” Ahlberg Yohe says. So, Folwell did. She graduated from a prestigious eastern college, then enrolled in law school, staying just two weeks before heading home to New Mexico.
“She went out into the world and she realized, ‘That is nothing compared to the world that I have in Santa Clara,’” Ahlberg Yohe says.
Sacred Lake, 1995 • Jody Folwell • Clay, pigment
Montclair Art Museum, NJ • Gift of Mrs. Henry Messinger Ayres and Acquisition Fund Photo: Peter Jacobs
The 1970s, when Folwell began making pots, was a time of foment for Santa Clara, whose conservative leadership and agrarian way of life were being eclipsed by changes from the larger world. The pueblo’s ceramics traditions already had been altered by tourist demands since the late 19th century. Folwell was clear that she did not want to make the standard, repetitious black and red polished pots featured at the Pueblo pottery market.
“When Jody began making pottery, there were only four designs that were commonly used, and deemed acceptable to use on Kha’p’o Owingeh [Santa Clara] pottery …” writes co-curator Bruce Bernstein in the catalog. “Jody blew open this idea by including all kinds of things in her pottery designs: letters, rubbers stamps; realistic animals and vegetables; iconography from Japan, Mexico, ancient European and Mesopotamian pottery; and more.”
From the very beginning, Folwell’s unique approach ran afoul of Santa Clara orthodoxy.
“She never accepted the fact that Pueblo art doesn’t change,” says Ahlberg Yohe, standing in front of Half a Step, 1975, Folwell’s first submission to Santa Fe Indian Market. We see a procession of buffalo sculpted in raw clay charging across a middle band of unpolished slip in a pot that is otherwise traditional in every way: perfectly symmetrical and slipped with rust-colored clay and highly polished top and bottom.
Half A Step, 1975 • Jody Folwell • Clay
Collection of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, NM
Befuddled Indian Market officials fretted. What to do with this anomaly?
“Pueblo potters weren’t allowed to do this,” Ahlberg Yohe says. “This was a radical step. It’s 1975. And it’s unfathomable: What other artist in 1975 had constraints that they couldn’t put a buffalo on their work of art?” Robert Rauschenberg? Jasper Johns? Claes Oldenburg? Ultimately, the piece won an award at the show and was soon emulated by younger artists.
If Indian Market judges were puzzled by Folwell’s Half a Step, they were outraged by her 1984 green The Hero Pot, made in collaboration with her then-partner Bob Haozous (Chiricahua Apache and son of Allan Houser).
The Hero Pot, 1984 • Jody Folwell and Bob Haozous • Clay, paint
Wishin Family Collection, Scottsdale, AZ
“I wanted to do something exciting,” Folwell recalls. “That whole fullness of the piece represents the culture and history of my people.” Haozous had etched zigzag lightning bands and a cascade of cowboys thrown from their horses on Folwell’s vibrant green vessel, topped by Folwell’s signature sloped mouth.
It created a sensation. Judges raged. What category did it fit? It couldn’t be a true Pueblo jar because Haozous, who had etched the figures, was Chiricahua Apache. “I can’t sell a green pot,” one judge groused. Did this outlier even belong at Indian Market? It was as if the sky was falling. But, Bernstein writes, half of the judging panel “rejoiced in Jody’s profoundly fresh voice.” They persuaded the team that the vessel represented innovation in an otherwise stale pottery marketplace and awarded Folwell’s visionary piece Best of Show, “opening the floodgates for other potters’ innovations.”
To paint a pot green was blasphemy, Ahlberg Yohe says. But using clay to comment on politics and war made Folwell’s oeuvre virtually unsaleable in the 1980s, ’90s, and 2000s.
The Wild West Show, 1996-2003, showing cowboys on galloping horses, merges Wild West idioms with the Iraq Wars at the height of her political narrative vessels. For some time, Folwell had ruminated about the violent repercussions of then-President George W. Bush’s order to invade Iraq after the 9/11 attacks.
“It was such a terrorizing period of the time,” Folwell says. She thought about how America’s imperialistic actions were braided into American history and how Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Shows of the late 1800s created a romanticized view of the American cowboy that carried over into ubiquitous western TV shows and films, inculcating mis-representations of Indians that continue in the American psyche today.
Using a comic-book style, she painted George Bush as a cowboy riding in the desert – a sheriff in full-on shoot-it-out mode. At the bottom of the pot, Osama bin Laden lies in the weeds, with Bush unwittingly riding right over him. Incorporated into the pot are intentionally hot-button words: “Ossama,” “Sadd-dam,” “Iraq,” and “Afgan.”
You Don't Push Bush, 2003 • Jody Folwell and Diego Romero • Clay, paint
Collection of Jody Folwell, Santa Clara, NM
“She’s drawing parallels that are uncomfortable to the American imagination,” Ahlberg Yohe says.
Before such political narratives, gallerist Lee Cohen of Gallery 10 in Santa Fe and Scottsdale had encouraged Folwell’s innovations, establishing a base of collectors for her work on both coasts. But collectors wanted nothing to do with her political or social commentaries. Most were ultraconservatives who wanted ceramics that fit into their beautiful home décor without butting up against their political beliefs, Ahlberg Yohe says.
Very few museum curators were acquiring this important work, either, she adds. If Folwell had had some institutional support, she could have continued making political and social statements. But museums held back. They may have been worried about looking too political. But they used the foils of “authenticity” and “aesthetic value” that Native artists so often face to avoid backing her.
Without that support, Folwell pivoted, reimagining herself. She visited faraway potters in Japan, New Zealand, Europe, and across South and Central America, incorporating and adapting their techniques. Her curiosity is reflected in I Had to Figure It Out, 2005, made after watching Mata Ortiz potters in northern Mexico use kerosene in both their slips and in polishing, as they worked in small, unventilated rooms.
Drawing connections between Pueblo petroglyphs and ancient artists’ work, Folwell borrowed horse imagery from France’s Lascaux caves for the stunning Ancient, 2018/2019. She visited her daughter, Susan, who was working with Indigenous people on the Pacific Northwest Coast, and borrowed the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw and Haida’s bold, fluid form lines designs, adding her own iconic cross symbols in intricately sgraffito designs in vessels like Northwest Coast Art 101, 2008. She drew flak from Northwest Coast artists for taking their design work and putting it on her pots.
A young Plains Indian artist confronted her for doing ledger-type paintings: “It’s not fair,” he railed, “for other artists to be taking our [Plains] history in art away from us.”
Northwest Coast Art 101, 2008 • Jody Folwell • Clay, paint
Collection of Susan Ratzkin, Thousand Oaks, CA
Folwell kept thinking about what he and the Northwest Coast artists had said.
Historically, artists have always taken from other artists, cultures, and eras, reworking what they see to reflect their own experiences. How much of the final product belongs to anyone? Folwell mused. And how much of it reflects everything she has seen, absorbed, and remembered?
Experimenting with color, she popped a Pueblo cow patty inside the ledger pot and sprayed it with kerosene before dropping it in a container of hot coals. To her, the piece seemed like an ineffable continuation of the endless artistic line from Lascaux to Santa Clara. But with considerable irony she named the resulting 2006 ledger pot, Doh San Quah (I Stole It).
Doh San Quah (I Stole It), 2006 • Jody Folwell • Clay, paint
Collection of Edward J. Guarino, New York, NY
“I like this piece because this is one of the pieces that I was reprimanded over, and I always found that very interesting,” she writes in the catalog. “It’s so important for [Native Peoples] to keep what they have, as part of their culture, to be able to save it in that manner … Yeah, it’s a hot-button issue,”
One of her most emotionally stirring metaphorical works is the multi-part Buffalo Soldier, 2023, commemorating Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign visit to Santa Clara, which drew effusive crowds that included Folwell. In this new work, she pictures Obama as a Buffalo Soldier, named for the Black regimens in the Civil War that after the war helped open up the West. For 15 years, Folwell thought about the stir Obama had created during his pueblo appearance and her own emotional response to him.
“It took him years to find his buffalo. Years. A long history, from the Civil War to the presidency …” Folwell muses.
A large white pot represents the White House. Obama rides a rearing buffalo on a sequence of scaled tiles. On the back of the largest tile, Folwell has written names of enslaved people who built the White House. Ten glossy miniature orbs with tiny openings represent Senators – who make the rules for everyone else – red for Republicans, black for Democrats.
Buffalo Soldier, 2023 • Jody Folwell • Clay, paint
Collection of Jody Folwell, Santa Clara, NM
“So, there’s that connection between me, the buffalo, and Obama – not so much just me, but so many American Indians that … come into play in this whole western exploration,” Folwell writes. “You’re looking at history, then all of a sudden you see this immense character that’s riding; he rode through the pages of history so fast, he got to the White House. He broke the glass ceiling.”
Over the years Folwell has listened to countless unwelcome lectures from Santa Clara village elders about how she had no right to make anything but traditional pots. She fought for months with the tribal council to earn the right to be a woman landowner and farmer. But for all her rebelliousness and wandering, “Wotsi” remains a true woman of the Pueblo.
“You can’t get more traditional than Jody in so many ways,” says Ahlberg Yohe. “She speaks the [Tewa] language. She thinks in Pueblo. Her thought process is Pueblo. She has lived nearly her entire life there, with the value system, the ceremonial structures and all the things she does as a Pueblo woman to host people for the feasts, for all the funerals.”
Folwell honors personal relationships and memories in many of her works. The signature image for the show is T’ah pa-ah’ wae (Dad’s Fish), 2000, a stunning personal tribute to her father, a minister and inveterate fisher, who regularly brought stringers of trout home to feed his large family and share with neighbors. Folwell sculpted more fish for a tall urn intended to bury her father’s and mother’s ashes. She tops the urn with a sculpted frog – acknowledging the many frogs her mother featured on her own pots and her funny observation that singers at the Santa Fe Opera looked like frogs as they belted out full-throated arias.
Dad's Fish, 2000 • Jody Folwell • Clay, paint
Collection of Edward J. Guarino, New York, NY
Folwell still pots, coiling her works on the kitchen table of her beautiful home on the outskirts of Santa Clara. Her most recent project is The Cycle of Pottery is Us, 2023-24 – seven pots and fragments – in a set that she has been working on for as long as Ahlberg Yohe has known her.
The Cycle of Pottery, 2023-24 • Jody Folwell • Clay, paint
Collection of Jody Folwell, Santa Clara, NM
It has to do with the evolution of Pueblo pottery – how outsiders influenced it so much that it nearly died out as a compelling art form – and how it took a generation of potters, led by Folwell, to revive it. In the label, she explains her quest. But because its components don’t quite match the vision she’s had in her head for nine years, she asked that it be left out of the catalog.
One superbly burnished black pot in the Cycle reminds you that Folwell says a pot is not complete until “It sings,” meaning that she and the pot, working together, both agree that it is complete. Even more intriguing are the degraded pots beside this perfection: One is half burnished but marred with deathly holes. Beside it are the shreds of another vessel that that looks as if it has been through a holocaust. Cradled within that wreckage is a small, white, perfectly round vessel with etched designs that bring to mind so many of the pottery cultures that Folwell has visited and the ideas she carried back from her journeys.
There was a time that Pueblo pottery nearly ceased to exist. The useful forms necessary for Pueblo cooking and trade had been replaced with metal durables from the East. And most of the unique Pueblo designs had been supplanted with quickly made tourist curios.
Cycle of Pottery becomes a poignant capsule of this Pueblo history, reminiscent of the exhibition title, O’Powa O’Meng, which means I came here, I got here, I’m still going. Indeed, Folwell is still going.
What is Ahlberg Yohe’s favorite work in the exhibition, her last for Mia, I ask? What will she carry with her? There is no one single work, she replies softly. “It’s the culmination. It’s marveling at the breadth and scope of a traditional Pueblo woman … And it’s all coming from one woman. Fifty years and still going.”
If you'd like to see more, Folwell's beautiful film is now available on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N66mEO94GXc
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