Olla (Water Jar)

Label

Looking just beneath the larger jar’s widest point, do you see the black stripes painted in a shell-shaped pattern? As if falling from the sky above, these abstracted rain clouds represent the importance of water in the Acoma Pueblo community, located in the colonized state of New Mexico. Water’s significance, preservation, and storage remain important today for the Acoma Pueblo and their neighbors, as suggested by the clouds adorning the smaller and more contemporary Santa Clara Pueblo bowl by Adam Speckled Rock.

How does water’s portrayal on these jars reflect communal relationships to water? How do these relationships relate to or differ from those portrayed in the paintings hanging nearby?

From the 2023 exhibition Liquidity: Art, Commodities, and Water, curated by Michael Hartman, Jonathan Little Cohen Associate Curator of American Art

Exhibition History

Gene Y. Kim, Class of 1985, Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, September 16, 1997-August 13, 2000.

Harrington Gallery Teaching Exhibition, Anthropology 32, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire.February 13-March 4, 1990.

Harrington Gallery Teaching Exhibition; Anthropology 32, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire.January 7-February 12, 1992.

Liquidity: Art, Commodities, and Water, Israel Sack Gallery and the Rush Family Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, July 29, 2023-June 16, 2024.

Main Lobby, Hood Museum of Art, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire.December 1, 1995-February 14, 1996.

Native Ecologies: Recycle, Resist, Protect, Sustain, Owen Robertson Cheatham Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 26, 2019-January 5, 2020

Waterways: Tension and Flow, Harrington Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, April 4-August 23, 2015.

Publication History

[Tamara Northern], "Native American Art". Hanover, New Hampshire: Hood Museum of Art, page 13. (Published in conjunction with Gutman Gallery opening exhibition)

Jacquelynn Baas, From "a few curious Elephants Bones" to Picasso, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, September, 1985, Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College, 1985, pp. 37-43, ill. p. 41

Beth Michelle Schrift, Pueblo Pottery of the Churchill Collection at the Turn of the Century: A Representation of Changing Times, 2004, pp. 1-102, ill. p. 61, fig. 19.

Provenance

Clara G. Corser Turner Churchill (1851-1945) and Frank Carroll Churchill (1850-1912), Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico, 1903-1907; bequeathed to present collection, 1946.

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