This is a spectacular large bowl by Jacob Koopee. The bowl is coil-built and stone polished.  It is painted with bee-weed (black) and four different colors of clay.  Let’s start inside the bowl as there are 22 hand prints.  They are of various sizes and surrounded by red clay for the stippling.  On the outside, there are sixteen bird wings above the shoulder and sixteen below, for a total of 32.  They are each divided into sections. The first is a classic “migration” pattern with thin lines.  The next group has stylized parrots with polished red, mauve, and burgundy sections.  The next section has tumbling parrots.  Note how they interconnect along the band between the wings!  The next section has polished red and burgundy bands with painted clouds and rain designs.  Connected to this section is a band with spider webs and one with wavy lines.  The final section has a shard design with lots of little pottery shard patterns. WOW!  This bowl just has it all!  Along the top there also also small hands that are stippled with black.  Near the base, the bowl has linear red, burgundy, and black lines painted in a “painterly” manner.  It is always a bit breathtaking to see Jacob’s larger pieces and the complexity of his later pottery.  The use of small “hand” designs that were a signature of Jake’s pottery imagery.  The mauve-colored clay is an unusual color of clay that was only used for a short while at Hopi by Jake, Mark Tahbo, Iris Nampeyo, and a few others.  The bowl was traditionally fired, so there are blushes across the surface of the piece.  It is signed on the bottom, “Koopee” and his hallmark Flute player.  The jar is in excellent condition with no chips, cracks, restoration, or repair.   Jake won numerous awards during his career including “Best of Show” in 2005 at both the Santa Fe Indian Market and the Heard Museum Market.  I was lucky to have been a pottery judge both years at both events, and it was exciting to see an artist create such dynamic work.

Men aren’t supposed to make pottery and women aren’t supposed to carve. And it’s just another world that you go deep into. But a lot of the women potters that I know, like how my character is, that’s how I’ve known them. Even my grandmother told me, ‘Well, if you’re gonna make pottery, you gotta know everything behind it, and you do know what you’re doing.  I look at the pot as traditional and nontraditional. I went into both worlds.” Jacob Koopee, Jr,, Spoken Through Clay