Robert Tenorio (Kewa)
Rainy Naha (Hopi)
natural dye to material. The vessels and whimsical bobble-head figures of Walatowa/Cochiti artist Jonathan Loretto get their deep, earthy brown-black coloring from the plant, which he calls wild spinach. He plans to exhibit in the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts courtyard during Indian Market. Loretto remembers his mother picking the plant and boiling it down to a paste to prep it for painting pottery. “Some people add sugar to it, but I’m not sure if everyone does. When you finally boil it down to paste, you put it on a dried cornhusk to dry.” The boiling usually lasts for several days. The mixture is strained and boiled again at various stages until a syrupy paste is left to dry on the cornhusks. Months or years later, the pigment can be crushed, rehydrated and painted onto a bone-dry pottery piece before being fired outdoors. “You really have to know how to control the fire when you’re using
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wild spinach” when firing pottery, Loretto explains, “because you can burn it off, or make the heat too high or too long and it will turn white. It will burn off in a commercial kiln, since the burning times are usually too long, so you have to do it outside. It takes years and years to finally lock into the right technique and skill. But once you get it, you get it.” Charles King, owner of King Galleries in Santa Fe and Scottsdale, Arizona, honors this expertise from a collector perspective. He believes that the use of beeweed on the surface of pottery is “less about the visual component and more about the cultural connection and history. Understanding the time it takes to prepare the beeweed and then the skill it takes to use it proficiently is part of why it should continue to be encouraged among artists,” King adds. “The color variation each time it is mixed — black to brown — is more dynamic and organic. It’s certainly part of the excitement of seeing how a piece will look
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