Praeterita

Meditation number 33 talks about my enthusiasm for the ceramics of Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, where I spent five days recently.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

In contrast to other travel article assignments this year, I didn't get the time to arrange visits to any artists' studios in advance of the trip to Albuquerque. But I did see some great things as we walked around the city. Such as, the bunches of dried chilis suspended from the frames of colonnades: Beautiful old pottery in the Albuquerque Museum of Art: Crushed tin cans decorated by children and fixed to the walls of an old downtown cinema, now being used as a religious meeting place: Navajo Code Talkers sitting at a table in Old Town, publicising a book about their exploits in WWII: The cool, shaded interior of the Iglesia de San Felipe de Neri on the Plaza in Old Town: And to cap it all off, on our last evening, there was a terrific thunderstorm, followed by a double rainbow. I shot this photo out of our hotel room, looking towards the Sandia mountains at 8 pm:   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

About a half hour drive south of Santa Fe, Madrid is an old mining town that still consists of a single winding street lined with old wooden cabins and small houses: After the mines closed, Madrid became a ghost town for a while, before being revived by artists, gallerists, musicians, and assorted eccentrics. This ceramic totem outside one house gives you a flavour: We were there to see John McNair, Patty's nephew-who-is-four-months-younger-than-me, play with his band at a place called The Mineshaft. The band is called  The Family Coal , and if you click on that name you'll go to their website. That's Johnny, below, with the shades and the white shirt, playing the mandolin and looking every inch the folk-roots god that he is: The Mine Shaft Tavern used to be, believe it or not, a mine. It's built around all the detritus and left-over paraphernalia of a mining operation, such as boardwalks leading into the hill sides, odd bits of machinery, and a giant steam locomo...

Old Town, Albuquerque.  

Last Saturday, I spent some time at Indian Market in Santa Fe, and took lots of photos, of which the following slideshow is a selection: Hundreds of vendors set up shop in booths that went all round the Plaza in Santa Fe and into the streets around it. There were musicians, fairground booths, a tent hosting an awards ceremony for the most outstanding craftsmen and women, and of course thousands of pieces of pottery, weavings, jewellery, sculpture, and other forms of art. There are more than 19 pueblos in New Mexico, each with its own distinctive artistic traditions and iconography, and they were all represented at the market. My favourite style of art is from Acoma Pueblo. The pueblo itself, which I visited a few years ago, is a collection of adobe buildings dating back more than 1,000 years, sitting high up on a mesa that looks from afar like a gigantic slab of clay laid down on the desert floor. The Acoma style of pottery is known for its thin clay walls, its off-white and black ...

12th century Indian pot.