Jody Folwell: Pueblo Pottery Revolutionary

Pueblo pottery has no equivalent in white culture or society. To Pueblo people, their pottery is functional, artistic, decorative, familial, and spiritual. It is teacher, friend, relative, ancestor. Pueblo pots tell stories and sing.

Pottery permeates the lives of Pueblo people.

No separation exists between the clay–the earth–and the maker. The pot and the potter are not merely connected, they are the same, in a different form.

I write this as a white person. An outsider only introduced to Pueblo pottery in 2022. Since then, I’ve been able to regularly observe it, write about it, interview many of its legendary practitioners, and come to understand some measure of its deep significance. To Pueblo people, however, it carries meanings and importance I will never fully grasp.

The cliché would be to write something like “clay is life;” from the outside looking in, clearly, it’s more important than that.

Newcomers to Pueblo pottery visiting “O’ Powa O’ Meng: The Art and Legacy of Jody Folwell” on view through June 15, 2025, at The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlotteville, should understand this walking through the door. Virginia’s a long way from present-day New Mexico, traditional homeland of the Pueblo people. This may be the first exposure to Pueblo pottery for many guests. Appreciating what’s on view begins with appreciating the societal gravity of the artwork. And the significance of this artist.

Jody Folwell, Wild West Show, 1996–2003 Clay, paint. 21 716 x 14 116 in. Courtesy of the School of Advanced Research, cat. no. SAR.2004-16-1. Photo by Addison Doty © Jody Folwell

Jody Folwell Pottery

“O’ Powa O’ Meng” features 20 works by contemporary potter Jody Folwell (b. 1942; Kha’p’o Owingeh/Santa Clara Pueblo). “O’ Powa O’ Meng” translates as “I came here, I got here, I’m still going” in the artist’s Tewa language.

Folwell has revolutionized contemporary Pueblo pottery—and Native art more broadly—by pushing the boundaries of form, content, and design.

“She is a radical woman,” Cara Romero (b. 1977; Chemehuevi) is quoted as saying in the exhibition catalogue. Romero is one of the most sought after contemporary artists in America by museums and collectors, Native or otherwise.

Folwell’s pottery, the work she’s most renowned for, will not look like the kind of Pueblo pottery you’ve seen in museums before. Folwell’s pottery takes unusual shape. She is the first Pueblo artist to employ text and pictures–detailed, realistic graphics portraying personal, political, and social narratives–on her pottery. A fusion of painting, Pop Art and Pueblo pottery.

For people familiar with the genre, if you’ve ever looked at a piece of Pueblo pottery and thought, “that’s weird,” you have Jody Folwell to thank, or blame, depending on your perspective. If a Pueblo pot has an asymmetrical shape, if it features writing or graphics, it descends from Jody Folwell. She was the first to do that.

Radical.

And not always appreciated for her revolutionary approaches to a way of life going back thousands of years. Generally speaking, Pueblo cultures don’t admire extreme individualism, mavericks, and “look-at-me” rebels–even among their artists.

“When I started working on pottery and I started taking that extra half a step away from traditional pottery, I met a great deal of negativity, and so I had to really think about what I was going to do,” Folwell said.

Folwell wasn’t upending the norms of Pueblo pottery simply for the sake of rebellion. This work, this style, was in her. Stymying her personal expression to fall in line wasn’t an option. Folwell can produce traditional Santa Clara pots of the highest caliber, still does, but the inherent drive to go her own way was as strong within Folwell as it was within Édouard Manet or David Bowie or any other artistic groundbreaker.

Jody Folwell, Ancient, 2018 or 2019 Clay, paint. 11 x 11 in. Collection of Susan Ratzkin, Thousand Oaks, Calif. Photo by Addison Doty © Jody Folwell

She figures that streak came from her parents, both orphans.

Folwell’s father's parents died by the time he was seven. He and his siblings were raised in part by an uncle along with the sisters at the Santa Fe Catholic School. Folwell’s mother was raised by her grandmother after her mother passed away when she was three.

“They had a different sense of the world from a very early age, especially my father being with the Catholic sisters in Santa Fe,” Folwell said. “By the time my father was 13, he was (taking) the Chili Line, or railroad line, that was passing through part of the reservation, and he would get on and go up to Colorado and pick potatoes.”

Folwell devised a compromise.

“I decided I was not going to make a stand within the Pueblo, and I was not going to have any of my (nontraditional) pieces be seen by the Pueblo or Santa Clara Pueblo members,” she explained. Her avant-garde work would be shown at Gallery 10 in Santa Fe and Scottsdale, AZ. “(Gallery 10 owner) Lee (Cohen) and I had a very long discussion about this. He said we'll try and just keep it at a low key, but eventually it will be a part of what is considered important. It will take time, he said, but I will buy everything that you make in regard to your pots. I have to give him a great deal of credit for the direction that Pueblo pottery has taken, whether people want to acknowledge that or not.”

Folwell has long since given up seeking universal approval.

“Tribal members still haven't accepted it basically, they're still doing very traditional work, and it's beautiful. Don't get me wrong, because I still do a lot of traditional work. I feel that's the basis of my work and go back to it often to have that spiritual sense that goes along with making and producing my work,” Folwell continued. “As my great grandmother said to us, there always are those spirits that come into play, the clay spirits you have to talk to. Everything that you do throughout the whole process has to do with the spiritual side of life.”

Jody Folwell, T’ah p-ah sa’ wae (Dad’s Fish), c. 2000. Clay, paint. 13 x 11 in. Collection of Jody Folwell, Santa Clara, N.M. Photo by Addison Doty © Jody Folwell

Jody Folwell’s Legacy

Folwell’s shapes and graphics and text and colors make each pot a distinct, recognizable, individual artwork, even to an untrained eye, not simply a variation, representative of a type. Many of her most legendary, most iconoclastic pots appear in “O’ Powa O’ Meng.”

1975’s Half a Step, a rough-finished, terra cotta-colored pot with galloping buffalo sculpted on the side. This piece introduced Folwell’s pottery revolution with a lightning bolt when it was presented at that year’s Santa Fe Indian Market, the oldest, largest, and most prestigious presentation of Indigenous art in the world. Pueblo pottery would never be the same.

1984’s green The Hero Pot, made in collaboration with her then-partner Bob Haozous (b. 1943; Chiricahua Apache and son of legendary Native sculptor Allan Houser). When The Hero Pot was submitted for judging at Santa Fe Indian Market, half the judges were outraged. The other half voted it “Best in Show.” Pueblo pottery would never be the same.

Later pots depict fish, an homage to her fisherman father, critiques of George Bush II and the Iraq War, and a ceramic piece commemorating Barak Obama’s presidential campaign stop in Santa Clara. Pueblo pottery would never be the same.

These signature artworks stack up through the years, again using a music analogy, like smash hits. Going back to Bowie, these pots are tantamount to “Heroes,” “Changes,” “Let’s Dance,” “Under Pressure,” “Ziggy Stardust,” “Rebel, Rebel,” leaving you wondering how one person was able to produce all this extraordinary, unique, memorable, genre defying and genre changing work.

“When Jody began making pottery, there were only four designs that were commonly used, and deemed acceptable to use on Kha’p’o Owingeh (Santa Clara) pottery …” co-curator Bruce Bernstein writes in the exhibition catalog. “Jody blew open this idea by including all kinds of things in her pottery designs: letters, rubbers stamps; realistic animals and vegetables; iconography from Japan, Mexico, ancient European and Mesopotamian pottery; and more.”

That is the art.

Jody Folwell’s legacy is the artists she has influenced and inspired. A who’s who of leading contemporary Native artists, many of whom have broken far outside of that silo. Start with her daughter Susan (1970; Kha’p’o Owingeh/Santa Clara Pueblo), a legend in her own right. Diego Romero (b. 1964; Cochiti Pueblo) and Les Namingha (b. 1967; Zuni-Tewa-Hopi). Roxanne Swentzell (b. 1962; Kha’p’o Owingeh/Santa Clara Pueblo), another icon in Pueblo pottery who challenged norms and changed the game.

“Jody’s skill with her medium is genius. Jody’s ability to go outside the usual shapes of vessels and use colors not often seen in traditional pottery is unmatched,” Swentzell said in the catalogue.

Also quoted in the catalogue praising Folwell and her innovations, Rose B. Simpson (1983; Kha’p’o Owingeh/Santa Clara Pueblo), arguably the most in-demand contemporary artist working today. Period. Simpson’s run off an unsurpassed list of major museum shows, commissions and exhibitions in the past handful of years including the 2024 Whitney Biennial, the most prestigious survey of contemporary American art. Simpson, Swentzell and Susan Folwell have all taken Jody Folwell’s radical innovations and run with them into radical, exciting, groundbreaking directions of their own.

Swentzell is Simpson’s mother and Jody Folwell’s niece. All descend from Rose Naranjo (1915-2004; Kha’p’o Owingeh/Santa Clara Pueblo), Folwell’s mother, a potter in her own right, as was Folwell’s great-grandmother. That’s the last critical understanding necessary for visitors to the exhibition new to Pueblo pottery. It is passed down through generations. It is familial. Folwell belongs to one of its greatest family traditions.

“I am standing on what my mother, my great grandmother, and members of the community taught me, and I am not alone in this, you have a whole community giving you direction, teaching you,” Folwell said.

Four works by Folwell’s mother and her daughters Susan and Polly Rose Folwell, as well as granddaughter Kaa Folwell, are additionally featured in “O’ Powa O’ Meng.”