Lucy Lewis; Acclaimed American Indian Potter

Lucy M. Lewis, an internationally recognized American Indian potter, has died at her home in Acoma Pueblo, N.M., after a long illness. Although her birth date was never recorded, she was believed to be 95.

Mrs. Lewis, who died March 12, was a regular exhibitor at the annual Native American Festival at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.

“I enjoy making pottery because it comes from inside,” she told The Times in 1984, speaking in Keresan, her tribal language.

Susan Peterson, Mrs. Lewis’ biographer and a professor of ceramic art at Hunter College, has said of the potter: “Lucy Lewis is one of those rare human beings who can take tradition and carry it one step further. She is one of the innovators, like (Pablo) Picasso and Jackson Pollock, on whom hang the rest of civilization. Not many like that come along in a lifetime.”

Mrs. Lewis, Peterson said in her lectures about the potter, “was influenced by the color of the sky and rocks, and by her own tradition and culture.”

“She had no schooling,” Peterson said, “no visits from outside artists or museum people. Her work comes from the center of her being; her art is an emotional, not an intellectual, process.”

Mrs. Lewis worked in two design types--black on white and polychrome. She specialized in small pots, usually between six and 12 inches in height, selling for $100 to several thousand dollars. Although she often painted animals on her pots, the bulk of her work involved line designs.

Her pueblo is the oldest continually inhabited settlement in North America.

“The Acomas consider the very clay they use to be sacred,” Peterson once explained. “To them it is the Mother Earth from which they came and to which they will return. The Acoma people make their ceramics from white clay mined from a secret location near their pueblo.”

Mrs. Lewis made a pot by rolling the clay into a coil, placing it in a huditzi, or saucer, and then forming it. The inside and outside were smoothed with a moist pebble and a tool made from a gourd, then decorated. A single pot could be the labor of two or three weeks.

In 1983, Mrs. Lewis was given New Mexico’s Governor’s Award for outstanding personal contribution to the art of the state. In 1977, she was invited to the White House, and her work is part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution.