For Santa Clara Pueblo-born and now Taos-based ceramicist Susan Folwell, the road is never just a line on a map. It is where memory meets movement, where material and ideas are born. In her ongoing Route 66 series, Folwell transforms clay into a kind of living archive, capturing the landmarks, contradictions, and quiet poetry of “America’s Main Street” as it stretches from Illinois to California.
One of her most recent works turns its attention to Tucumcari, New Mexico, where neon nostalgia and desert horizon meet in the layered history of a highway that has carried generations of travelers west in search of opportunity.
Folwell’s ceramic “roadscapes” are built on traditional Pueblo pottery forms but in her signature style, pushes far beyond convention. Wide-mouthed vessels become panoramic surfaces, where painted imagery wraps around the curve like a film reel in motion. On one recent piece, Stuckey’s Candy and its iconic pecan log roll appear alongside TeePee Curios, a roadside gas station turned souvenir shop that has stood since 1959. Spinning the pot, she described, is like standing in a parking lot watching the highway hum with passing lives and fading light.
“I make pots to build a canvas to paint on,” Folwell said describing her process. “I love challenging myself with the clay.”
Born into a family of acclaimed potters at Santa Clara Pueblo, Folwell grew up surrounded by clay. Her mother, Jody Folwell, and sister, Polly Rose Folwell, are both celebrated artists in their own right, part of a continuum of Pueblo pottery that has shaped contemporary Native art for decades.
“You can’t throw a rock without hitting a potter,” she said, describing a lineage that is both inheritance and constant creative conversation.
Although she initially studied painting and later photography in college, Folwell ultimately returned to clay, drawn to its resistance and possibility. That tension between tradition and experimentation runs through her work. She incorporates micaceous clay from the Taos region, a material she describes as deeply sculptural, allowing her to push form and surface in ways that Santa Clara clay would not permit. The result is work that honors Pueblo pottery while expanding its visual language into something unmistakably contemporary — and unmistakenly Folwell.
The Route 66 series emerged from memory every bit as much as material. Folwell recalls traveling the highway throughout her childhood, accompanying her mother on trips to art shows in Scottsdale and Santa Fe.
“Route 66 was the original road,” she said. “We would pass through Gallup, Holbrook, all of it. It became this visual vocabulary for me.”
That vocabulary now includes both nostalgia and critique. While the imagery of Route 66 often leans toward idealized Americana, Folwell’s attention goes to its layered realities. The romance of the open road sits alongside the remnants of economic hardship and environmental wear. When talking about upcoming works, she discussed incorporating rusted barbed wire, empty fields and discarded objects, acknowledging what lies beyond the postcard version of the highway.
“There is a darker side to Route 66,” she said. “It’s not just the perfect family vacation. There is history there, struggle there.”
Her work has resonated widely. Most of her Route 66 pieces are already in private collections, and two were recently donated to the Art Institute of Chicago, a symbolic placement given that Route 66 famously begins just outside the museum’s doors. Folwell was invited to speak at the institution, where she addressed a large audience about her practice and the evolving place of Native art in major American museums.
“In the past, so much Native work was placed in anthropology sections,” she said. “But these pieces are contemporary. They belong in conversations about American art.”
The Chicago Institute of Art agrees. Two of her donated Route 66 pieces now share gallery space alongside Grant Wood’s, “American Gothic” and Norman Rockwell’s, “The Dugout.” It is the kind of placement that quietly acknowledges what she has believed all along: contemporary Native art isn't separate from American art. It is American art.
The Chicago moment marked another milestone in a career already recognized by major institutions and markets, including the Santa Fe Indian Market and the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market. Yet Folwell describes herself less in terms of artistic identity and more in terms of daily practice.
“I don’t really think of myself as an artist in some grand way,” she said. “I just do it. It’s just life.”
Her longtime gallerist, Charles King of King Galleries in Scottsdale and Santa Fe, has worked with Folwell for more than 25 years and has been instrumental in expanding the reach of her Route 66 series. Together, they recently traveled from Santa Fe to Tulsa, driving the historic highway and documenting the journey using Polaroid cameras.
“We took about 300 photos,” King said. “There was something very nostalgic about it. It made us slow down and actually participate in Route 66 rather than just pass through it.”
The trip unfolded without hotel reservations or strict plans. Days stretched from morning to night as they moved through small towns, roadside attractions, and wide stretches of open road. Evenings were spent sorting through the Polaroid images selecting their favorites.
“It became very freeing,” King said of their road trip that had no set schedule and no destination pressure. “We stopped when we wanted to and stayed as long as we wanted to.”
What they found was not only the familiar iconography of Route 66 but also its living present, including the travelers who continue to seek it out. Along the way, they encountered others tracing the same path, from American tourists to young visitors from abroad, all drawn to the mythology of the highway.
For King, the experience underscored Folwell’s particular way of seeing. “She notices things I would never notice,” he explained. “She looks at the bigger picture, but also the small details that carry meaning. That changes how you experience the road.”
In the end, the journey became less about documentation and more about perception, a shared exercise in attention. For Folwell, it may also signal a shift in the series itself, toward works that incorporate the nostalgia of Route 66 accompanied by its emptier fields, its sketchy edges, and its unresolved histories.
“There’s a magic to it,” King said. “You slow down, you talk, you look, and you realize the road is still very much alive.” The work, like the road, is also alive. Folwell and King are planning a show for either later this year or early spring with new pieces in her Route 66 series. To learn more visit kinggalleries.com.