You can find Shirley Brauker's Native American pottery in the Smithsonian, Heard, and Eiteljorg museums and elsewhere. The late Mr. Eiteljorg himself selected some of her pieces.

Her artworks have garnered many first-, second-, and third-place prizes at the prestigious Santa Fe and Eiteljorg Indian markets. She was invited to a Smithsonian show this December and was told, "We love your work." She has had a show at the Field Museum in Chicago, and she has conducted numerous week-long residencies in places from Sitka, Alaska, to Michigan State University.

You'll find her featured in Fine Art of the Great Lakes (2007), Contemporary Indian Artists, in articles in Southwest Art, and in a 1986 documentary film, "Woodland Traditions: The Art of 3 Native Americans," which still airs yearly on PBS. Every fourth-grader in Michigan is given a state history book which features Shirley.

Now, thanks to the generosity of Walter (BAD 1956) and Don Nell Cunningham, long-time friends of the Humanities Institute, you can find her work in Taylor Hall.

We challenged Shirley to create a New World Janus to pair with our Trine Janus discussed in the last issue of Discover. This sent her in new directions. "The form of the Janus pot is very new to me," she writes. She was unhappy with her first attempt and so started over: "I completely changed the shape from the first one, and came up with a more 'classical' goblet shape."

Faces, she felt, were not her forte, so she "looked at countless sculptures and techniques for the eyes and bone structure." She used a mirror to see the first face to help her approximate the face on the other side. The pot sat in her studio to dry for two months.

"Any moisture in a large pot can cause it to blow up during firing... The firing went to 1,835 degrees," she writes. "This matures the clay and gets it ready for the second firing, called the 'glaze' firing. I used iron oxide to cover the surface. After it soaks into the pot, I use a sponge to wipe off the excess and create 'highlights.' The stain soaks into the deeper recesses and shows up as dark shadows. It is wiped off the higher surfaces and causes the lighter areas. Then back into the kiln for another eight hours or so until it reaches 2,305 degrees."

What she has created, with a nod to classical form, is a stark, haunting, indigenous, almost primordial face, one predating the Roman Janus. The symbol of the crescent moon goes at least as far back as the ancient cave paintings. Maybe this is the sturdy face of one who crossed the Bering land mass and ventured forth into what was truly an unbesmirched New World.