We have over 3,000 posts in our vault. We occasionally repost from this cache of top features on art, design and architecture, but especially so in the case when the world of ceramic art and contemporary ceramics has lost a kindred such as noted Navajo ceramist and sculptor Christine McHorse, who passed away on February 18, 2021.
View the online exhibition catalogue of Dark Light: The Ceramics of Christine Nofchissey McHorse here.
McHorse (1948 – 2021) was born in Morenci, Arizona and lived and worked in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She received her formal education at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where she studied between 1963 and 1968. McHorse has received numerous awards from the SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market, and the Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial, Gallup, as well as the Museum of Northern Arizona. Her work is included in the public collections of the Denver Museum of Natural History; Museum of New Mexico; Smithsonian Museum of American Art; Navajo Nation Museum; and the Rockwell Museum of Western Art. A first generation Navajo ceramic artist, she married Joel McHorse, of Taos Pueblo, and learned to make pots through his grandmother, Lena Archuleta. Archuleta taught McHorse to work with micaceous clay, a rare, but naturally occurring clay high in shimmery mica content found in the Taos area.
McHorse is one of the most admired and successful Native potters, working with traditional techniques but making the kind of reductive, sculptural pots that one would have expected Brancusi to make, were he alive today. McHorse has the unique distinction of winning Best in Show for both pottery and sculpture at the annual SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market.
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