- Title
- House Group
- Culture
- Nayarit
- Date Made
- 200 BCE–500 CE
- Medium
- Slip-painted ceramic
- Dimensions
- 11 1/2 x 8 x 6 in. (29.21 x 20.32 x 15.24 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.86.296.38
- Collecting Area
- Art of the Ancient Americas
- Curatorial Notes
This Nayarit house, modeled in clay, represents at once a house and the Mesoamerican cosmos at large. Its uppermost register consists of a gabled roof, elaborately decorated with a diamond pattern. The next register is the living space, where the viewer encounters a cluster of human figures, perhaps mourners. They spill from the interior of the building onto its front steps, which emerge from the lowermost register: a basal platform that sustains the structure. On the back side of the house, a hollowed niche holds a figure who lies on their side in a flexed position. Across Mesoamerica, it was common to bury the dead underneath the floor of the house; we might suspect that this figure is a recently interred ancestor and the subject of the mourners’ grief. The rectilinear form of the house re-creates the cosmic order, which in Mesoamerica consists of four corners and four sides. Its three registers align with the celestial, terrestrial, and aquatic (i.e., underworld) realms of the cosmos.
Alyce de Carteret
2024
- Selected Bibliography
- Kan, Michael, Meighan, Clement, Nicholson, H.B. and Rexford Stead. Sculpture of Ancient West Mexico: Nayarit, Jalisco, Colima. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1970.
- Von Winning, Hasso, and Olga Hammer. Anecdotal Sculpture of Ancient West Mexico. Los Angeles: Ethnic Arts Council of Los Angeles, 1972.
- Magaloni, Diana, Davide Domenici, and Alyce de Carteret. We Live in Painting: the Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2024.
