Vintage Nemadji Pottery

Nemadji pottery was designed to appear to have been made by Native American potters of the Southwest, but the company was founded in 1920 in Moose Lake, Minnesota. Originally, the company produced bricks, but ceramic tiles and decorative pottery followed. The multi-colored swirling pieces we think of today as Nemadji pottery were conceived in 1929 by a Danish designer name Eric Hellman, who came up with a way to color fired pots without the application of exterior glazing by giving them a bath in a tank filled with polychrome enamels. That would have been fine as a technique for a new product, but apparently the folks who ran Nemadji believed their wares needed a Native American backstory, so they wrote a few paragraphs of often racist nonsense—"The warm rich colors of this pottery recall the colorful costumes of the redman, who, though long since gone to the happy hunting ground, still haunts in spirit the plains, streams, woods, and lakes of this our Empire."—in an attempt to give their product designed for the tourist credibility. Today, vintage Nemadji pottery is collected for its often fancifully handsome appearance, as well as its kitsch value, the sort of thing that many collectors find just ugly enough to be considered cool.