Adventures in cross-cultural sampling.
Alan Gallegos was a dear friend. He came from the village of San Juan de Oriente, Nicaragua, known for it’s many “Pre-Columbian” style potters. I worked with Alan during my time in Nicaragua with Potters for Peace (PFP). The burnished, slab molded, 6″d. plate shown here is from San Juan de Oriente. But it isn’t Alan’s. Sadly, I don’t own any of his work.
Alan was large, gentle, and quiet. He was an extremely talented potter, and a valued member of PFP’s team. One day Alan’s body was discovered along a roadside. Did he accidentally fall off a truck while hitch hiking? Was he robbed and killed? Nobody knows.
I had left Nicaragua before Alan’s death. The town I was living in just became a Sister City to a community of repatriated refugees in El Salvador, from that country’s civil war. Many Salvadorans had fled to Nicaragua during the war. I knew a group of those refugees who lived next to a PFP pottery project. Kids from this little group painted the pottery’s seconds to sell for extra cash. Ironically, their new community was my town’s Sister City.
So there I was, struggling to work on an Empty Bowls fund raiser for the Sister City effort. That night, after hearing of Alan’ death, I began decorating: a jagged border around the rims (Central America’s many volcanoes) above five panels (the five original Central American countries) blocked out by vertical rows of circles (the Mayan counting system). Each panel contained a pre-Columbian phoenix.
The thought of using pre-Columbian designs in my own work always felt problematic (due largely to Central America’s history and my European ancestry). But I had the distinct feeling Alan was beside me as I worked. I wouldn’t have blinked if he reached over, picked up a bowl, and began talking.
Something then occurred to me that I hadn’t thought about for ages. Years earlier I apprenticed to Richard Bresnahan, who told me he felt he was communicating with ancient potters of southern Japan (where he had done his own apprenticeship) whenever he applied Japanese-style “mishima” inlay to his pots. “Neat idea,” I thought at the time, before getting on with the day…
Cultural ‘mining’ can leave a long, painful trail. Communication that transcends that tale requires healthy doses of respect and empathy. Now I know how powerful this communication can be.
This Day in Pottery History 