Maria of Cochiti

Date1929

Maker Allan Clark Born Missoula, Montana, 1896; died Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1950

Label TextClark sought a new modern art in unconventional subjects and materials. He had begun his career working for Seattle architect Carl Gould on sculptural bas reliefs for buildings on the University of Washington campus, but his travels in Asia inspired him to move beyond the aesthetic tenets of classical Greece and Rome and to explore other sculpture traditions. He came to love sculpting in wood, a technique that in America was typically associated only with craft traditions or with untutored artists. Clark settled in New Mexico in 1929 and began carving portrait heads of individuals he met among the Pueblo people there.This subject, Maria, was from the Cochiti Pueblo.

Object number33.882

ProvenancePossibly the artist, Santa Fe, New Mexico, by gift or commission to Richard Fuller, Seattle, by 1933

Photo CreditPhoto: Paul Macapia

Exhibition HistoryTacoma, Washington State Historical Society, Memorial Exhibit of the Work of Allan Clark, Mar.-Apr. 1962, checklist no. 39 [as Cochita].Published ReferencesAnnual Report of the Seattle Art Museum, formerly The Art Institute of Seattle, Twenty-eighth Year, 1933 (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum [1934]), p. 24. American Art Annual 30 (1933), pp. 297 [called Maria Cochita] and p. 465 [called Maria of Cochati]. Sculpture by Allan Clark (Brookgreen Gardens, S.C.: Brookgreen Gardens, 1937), n.p. [called Maria of Cochiti].

Credit LineEugene Fuller Memorial Collection

Dimensions19 1/2 x 18 x 9 13/16 in. (49.5 x 45.7 x 25 cm)

MediumPear wood