Alice Cling

Navajo

Born in 1946, Alice started playing with clay as a young girl but didn't become a recognized Navajo potter until the late 1980s. After she graduated from a federal government boarding school she returned home to the Shonto area. Once back home, she learned the formal process for making pottery from her mother, Rose Williams, and her aunt, Grace Barlow.

Alice digs her clay from somewhere near Black Mesa. Once she processes her clay and makes a pot, she applies an iron-bearing slip to it and polishes the surfaces with either a river stone or a Popsicle stick. When she fires her pots, the ash that falls onto them from the juniper wood pit fire merges into the clay to produce the blushes (known as fire clouds) on her pottery that give it that warm feeling. After the firing, she usually brushes on a light coating of warm piñon pitch and once that dries, burnishes each pot to a distinctive low shine.

Alice's career really took off when one of her pots was shown in the Vice President's mansion in Washington, DC in 1978. Over the next 19 years Alice participated in many shows around the country and earned many awards. Then in 1997 she was included in the Pottery by American Indian Women, the Legacy of Generations exhibition and book by Susan Peterson at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC.

At that point Alice stopped competing and just stayed home to make pots. She's still doing that. Aice signs the bottom of her pieces "Alice Cling".