Talking Birds The Ceramic of Casas Grandes Book Softcover
Talking Birds The Ceramic of Casas Grandes Book Softcover
Talking Birds, Plumed Serpents and Painted Women: The Ceramics of Casas Grandes
This bilingual exhibition catalog, published by the Tucson Museum of Art in 2002, is the essential visual and scholarly introduction to the ceramics of Casas Grandes, the ancient civilization that flourished in the Chihuahuan desert of northern Mexico from roughly 1200 to 1450 AD. The site of Paquimé, remote and long overshadowed by Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde, produced some of the most visually arresting pottery of the ancient Americas, and this volume gives it the full attention it deserves.
For collectors of Mata Ortiz pottery, this book is something more than a catalog. The tradition did not die with the demise of Casas Grandes. Some 550 years later, the potters of the region resurrected it and today produce work that frequently surpasses the ancient pieces in technical refinement. Understanding the original iconography transforms how you read a contemporary Mata Ortiz vessel. This volume is where that understanding begins.
Seventy-five of the finest surviving pieces are photographed in full color, their bold polychrome surfaces in red, black, and white carrying an iconography drawn from Casas Grandes cosmology: macaws, serpents, transformation figures, and the enigmatic painted women of the title, interwoven with geometric designs of startling sophistication. Humans are portrayed in a variety of poses that continue to challenge art historians, all embedded within complex geometric designs that feel more contemporary than ancient.
90 pages
75 color illustrations · Bilingual English and Spanish Tucson Museum of Art, 2002
