'Casas Grandes And The Ceramic Art Of The Ancient Southwest'

CHICAGO, ILL.

:Just south of the New Mexico border lies a region that many North Americans, if they think of it at all, associate more with the depraved and desperate terrain of John Huston's classic film, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, than with a triumphant ancient civilization with highly sophisticated ceramic art.

This sparsely populated area in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua was once home to a cluster of flourishing indigenous communities known collectively as Casas Grandes, the name of a river that ran though them. Far north of the great Mesoamerican sites of the Valley of Mexico and south of the US Puebloan ruins, Casas Grandes was long overlooked by scholars and collectors on both sides of the border.

Today, Casas Grandes, at its height between 1250 and 1475, is the subject of intensive study. Built in a generation, the stepped-adobe village of Paquime, Casas Grandes' largest settlement, most resembled Taos, the still inhabited pueblo in northern New Mexico.

The architectural correspondence between the two sites is just one of many indications that Casas Grandes was part of the greater Southwestern world, as well as a chronological link between the ancient Hohokam, Anasazi and Mogollon sites of Arizona and New Mexico and the comparatively modern settlements that dot the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and line the Rio Grande riverbanks north of Albuquerque.

More evidence of this fraternity is arrayed in "Casa Grandes and the Ceramic Art of the Ancient Southwest." At the Art Institute of Chicago through August 13, the show juxtaposes 60 Casas Grandes vessels, many on loan from private collections, with a comparable number of Hohokam, Anasazi and Mimbres pots whose similar shapes and complex designs brand them as from the same extended family. The exhibition, which will not travel, is the first of its kind.

"Those who sojourn in the Southwest with an eye for the landscape and an interest in American Indian art and culture will always remain profoundly affected by the sweep of the setting and the ancient communities with deeply rooted traditions," writes curator Richard F. Townsend, who organized the exhibition.

"Casas Grandes and the Ceramic Art of the Ancient Southwest" is the latest in a series of Institute shows with Pan-American themes. "The Ancient Americas: Art from Sacred Landscapes," organized by the curator in 1992, was followed by "Ancient West Mexico: Art and Archaeology of the Unknown Past" in 1998 and "Hero, Hawk and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South" in 2004.