Hidden in Plain Sight: Translational Remainders and the Political Aesthetics of Hybrid Ceramics in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico

The discourses of Anthropology and Art History have both neglected the creative expressions of Native women artists from amidst the fraught political contexts of colonialism. Culturally hybrid ceramic vessels from seventeenth-century New Mexico are a notable example, combining Euro-American forms with Indigenous artistic traditions. Their archaeological traces fall between nationalist frameworks and fit poorly with disciplinary prerogatives, being Native and Latin American artworks in the present-day United States. Just as these works by anonymous Indian women resist anthropological categorization, art historians have also overlooked and discounted them as mere “craft.” The perception that they simply copy Spanish majolica imports has been especially damning, dismissing them as unimportant and derivative according to prejudicial conceptions of artistic imitation and originality.

This paper draws on critical translation theory to reconsider hybrid ceramics apart from value-laden discourses of imitation. It foregrounds the diverse agencies of Indigenous women, and new meanings arising through their creative adaptations of majolica motifs to Pueblo visual languages. The Hopi Mesas were a leading artistic center in Early-Modern North America, and continued to create refined polychromatic ceramics under colonial rule. Drawing on an unpublished archaeological corpus of these works, this study explores painted iconography transforming Spanish ornament into culturally and religiously significant Pueblo symbols. It demonstrates the persistence of Pueblo imagery and world views amidst colonial mission networks, and artists’ resistance to Spanish ideology through creative (mis)translation. As a result, these carefully rendered artworks have remained hidden in plain sight ever since, overlooked by colonial occupiers and art historians alike.