Georgia Harris in her home in the late 1990s

The life and work of Georgia Harris, a Catawba Indian artist, teacher, and tradition-bearer, will be the focus of an upcoming exhibit on the campus of USC Lancaster.  In 1997, the National Endowment for the Arts named the late Georgia Harris a National Heritage Fellow. 

Ms. Harris, a native of Lancaster, SC, was recognized for her achievements as one of the few remaining Catawba potters using traditional techniques and forms. 

Georgia Harris and her son Dewey
in the 1930s

Georgia Harris exhibited her work or demonstrated her techniques in a number of galleries and museums, including the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, and she directly or indirectly influenced most of the best of today’s Catawba potters, whose work, like Ms. Harris’s, is part of tradition that stretches back hundreds, if not thousands, of years.  Early European explorers in the Carolinas encountered Native Catawbas, or Iswas, making pottery from clay gathered from the river which today bears their people’s name, as their ancestors had done for generations, and as their descendents continue to do today. 

A snake vase, an original design
by Georgia Harris

On November 15, 2008, the Native American Studies Program at USCL will host an exhibit focusing on Harris’s life and art, the Catawba traditions that shaped her work, and those traditions she helped to preserve.  The exhibit will feature examples of Georgia Harris’s pottery, works by those who taught her as well as those she taught, documents and other materials drawn from the USCL Thomas J. Blumer Catawba Research Collection, and additional displays highlighting the unique history of Catawba Indian pottery. 

The exhibit opening will coincide with the Catawba Cultural Center’s Yap Ye Iswa (“Day of the Catawba”) Festival, which returns to the USCL campus for a second year. Other performances, lectures, and demonstrations will be scheduled throughout the run of the exhibit, which will close April 30, 2009.  The exhibit will be housed in the Bradley Building on the USCL campus.  The USCL Native American Studies Program receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the SC Arts Commission, the SC Budget and Control Board’s Competitive Grants Program, and the Duke Energy Foundation.

For more information, contact Dr. Stephen Criswell, Director of Native American Studies, at 803-313-7108 or criswese@mailbox.sc.edu.