Nora Naranjo Morse

The Black, White, and Brown of It

These three totems have six siblings (as artist Nora Naranjo Morse refers to them) scattered around the world. Morse (Santa Clara Pueblo) intended for the works to be shown together as a group of nine. She created the pieces over many months while reflecting on her career in ceramics and the art world’s restrictive expectations of Pueblo artists. The Black, White, and Brown of It features some of Morse’s most experimental engagements with the surface of clay. She treats the clay like canvas and paints expressionistically across it. Morse combines universally recognizable icons with cultural symbols from Pueblo culture. Some of these inscriptions recall petroglyphs that past generations of Pueblo people carved into the landscape. Morse digs, gathers, and mixes her clay from a clay vein in Kha’p’oe Owingeh (Santa Clara Pueblo), her ancestral homelands. By painting the locally harvested clay, Morse leaves her mark on the landscape in a gesture parallel to the petroglyphs.