Casa Grandes and the Ceramic Art of the Ancient Southwest
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Encountering antiquities in situ can be an amazing experience. But the Art Institute has created a different kind of contemplative space. A mural of ancient figures very much like the ones I saw in southern Utah greets viewers at the show’s entrance. Photographic murals show aerial views of two archaeological sites: the ruined cities of Chaco Canyon in western New Mexico and the Paquime settlement in Mexico. The sites’ stark geometric patterns are echoed in the designs on the vessels, displayed in spotless, reflective vitrines. Semitransparent scrims on the walls also reflect the pots’ designs, amplifying the visual dialogue of proliferating geometric shapes and animal and human forms in a process of metamorphosis; viewers can easily become entangled in the artifacts’ conversations.
The exhibit includes some 120 vessels, half of which are in the Casas Grandes style while the other half represent earlier cultures. The Casas Grandes pots have never before been on display because the culture’s settlements were excavated later than other sites, only in the last half century. Research indicates that sometime between 1100 and 1200 AD an extended drought drove cultures from the American southwest to the banks of the Casas Grandes River in central northern Mexico, where within three generations the large, sophisticated city of Paquime was built, flourishing between 1250 and 1475. Long believed to be the northern outpost of Mesoamerican cultures like the Olmec and the Aztec, Casas Grandes is now thought to be the southern outpost of cultures from the American southwest, blending their graphic styles with Mesoamerican mythology.
The surrealists, notably Max Ernst, prized Amerindian artifacts for their expression of the marvelous–of the dialectical relationship between reality and dreams. In what was called “primitive” art, the energy of direct connections between men, women, and cosmological powers was not suppressed. But artists and other creative people aren’t the only ones who’ve taken real or imaginary possession of these works. So have academics–archaeologists, anthropologists, art historians–and high-end collectors (a companion exhibit of southwestern artifacts at Douglas Dawson ended recently). Meanwhile traditional Navajos shun the potsherds that are everywhere in the New Mexico-Arizona region: there are cultural injunctions against violating ruins and relics. Looters can legally be shot on sight because the artifacts are the heritage of the indigenous people and often scattered on sacred lands.
Price: $12; $7 children, students, seniors. Kids under 12 free. Thursdays and Fridays 5-9 PM free.
