Featured on my Facebook page, and posted here for archiving.

Nampeyo (1859-1942), of the Hopi-Tewa people of First Mesa, Arizona, used ancient techniques and materials to produce bowls and pots and other ceramics decorated in the muted tones of the Southwest. She is reported as saying, “When I first began to paint, I used to go to the ancient village and pick up pieces of pottery and copy the designs. That is how I learned to paint. But now, I just close my eyes and see designs and I paint them.” Her beautiful and skillful work won admirers far beyond First Mesa, especially after 1898 when Nampeyo and her husband Lesou exhibited her work in Chicago. One of her pots, sold for $350,000 in 2010, set a world record for Southwest Indian ceramic arts.

More important than the price her work commands throughout the U.S. and Europe is the restoration of the ancient Hopi traditional art, and the generations of Nampeyo’s descendants who have continued the tradition, becoming artists in their own right. Not the least of these was her youngest daughter Fannie (born Popongua) Lesou Nampeyo Polacca (1904-1987), who began working with her mother as a child, learning the techniques, serving as her mother’s eyes when Nampeyo began to go blind, and collaborating with her mother on new designs.

Fannie and her husband Vinton Polacca had a dozen children. Many died in infancy or childhood, but of those who survived, all graduated from high school and several went on to college. They, along with Fannie and Vinton, became Latter-day Saints. Vinton’s father Tom had been baptized by Jacob Hamblin, and although he lost contact with Mormons for decades, Vinton remembered his father’s stories of the Book of Mormon and his promise that someday the Church would come back to them. It did, when Fannie and Vinton were living in Snowflake, Arizona; they were among the first of a lasting Hopi LDS population in the region..

Fannie, who grew up learning ancient pottery techniques and who produced such pots throughout her life, learned new techniques as a member of the Relief Society – some of those skills, ironically, having to do with modern pots. As reported by one of the apostles in the 1943 General Conference:

“It was my good fortune to meet with a little group of some of the Lamanite brethren who live down there [in Arizona and New Mexico] – one couple in particular, a Brother and Sister Palaca [Polacca], faithful, and true, and devoted. Sister Palaca goes out with a little pressure cooker that has been provided for her, and among the Lamanite women she teaches them how to can their vegetables and their fruit, and how to make quilts, according to the Relief Society way.”

(A Google search of: Polacca site:lds.org will show you much more about the artistic and spiritual heritage of the Polacca family.)

Fannie’s mother, Nampeyo:

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