Description

Fannie Loretto makes ceramic masks using traditional clay, materials and colors or slips. Fannie is half Jemez and half Laguna, she is a member of the water clan. She creates her masks using natural pigments and local clay and she grinds, cleans, mixes the clay, hand pinches, shapes, paints, and fires her art, outdoors the traditional way. The mask is accented with horse hair, ribbons and corn husks. The mask depicts the face of a Pueblo clown (known as a Koshare among the Keres people), which act as jesters or tricksters in the Kachina religion (practiced by the Pueblo natives of the southwestern United States).