Lucy Lewis is one of the great Matriarch potters of the past century. This thin-walled bowl is coil-built and painted with bee-weed and clay slips.  The bowl is one of the earliest dated pieces we have seen of work, having a 1959 date painted on the bottom before firing. The bowl is a classic Acoma design with red slipped mountains and fine-line rain designs.  The bowl was traditionally fired giving it a darker coloration from the smoke.  The shape works perfectly for the imagery.  It is signed on the bottom, “Lucy M. Lewis  1959.  It is in very good condition with no cracks, restoration, or repair.

“There was a time a long time ago when Acoma pottery had almost died out. Lucy revived it, she kept it going. We saw photos of the Mimbres pottery for the first time in the late fifties. Lucy had been doing fine-line designs much earlier, from the sherds. She had developed several different ways of doing those lines. Some of her designs were similar to the Mimbres ones, and when she saw those she went on developing more of her own.” Dolores Lewis, Spoken Through Clay