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Message:: [QUOTE="Taupou, post: 330718, member: 45"]The internet is filled with pages telling how horsehair pottery is an old Indian art, how the technique was "discovered" by a Navajo woman, or an Acoma woman potter, or any number of other tribal potters. None of this is true. It has become an interesting sales pitch, and good marketing technique, but it is not factual. It has become one of those "urban legends" that everyone believes, but no one can prove. The fact is, studio potters were making horsehair decorated pottery in the late 1960's. It was an outgrowth of the raku process (started by Paul Soldner in 1960.) Raku workshops were given all over the country, and studio potters experimented with it, and developed the technique of horsehair decorated pots. There were articles published in Ceramics Monthly Magazine in 1966 on how to do it, and probably every college student who took pottery classes in the 1970's experimented at some time with it. Workshops, textbooks, classes, featured it.  I bought a piece in 1971.  It started showing up in galleries, as potters improved their techniques. In the late 1980s/early 1990s, the first horsehair pots started appearing in southwest tourist gift shops, when the process was used by some Navajo potters.  Unlike studio potters, who made their own pots on a potter's wheel, the Navajo bought greenware forms to do horsehair pottery firings, because it is so easy and fast to do, and wholesalers in Gallup had recently started selling the molded forms.  Then a few pueblo potters started making it. The "creative," but false, stories about its history, followed, were re-told by tourists who heard it from an Indian potter, and once everyone was connected to the internet, the fabricated stories were spread by people "researching" on the internet.[/QUOTE]

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