Lawrence Namoki comes to Museo de las Americas to talk pottery and the end of the world

John Cusak is excited about pottery.

​If you're a fan of John Cusak, you already know that the end of the world is less than two years away, and you know that we know that because that's what the Mayans said 3,000 years ago. Less well known to Cusak fans, though, is that the Hopi Indians of the Four Corners region predict roughly the same outcome -- and there's some pretty weird prophetical evidence that it's coming at roughly the same time. On Saturday, noted Hopi medicine man and potter Lawrence Namoki will appear at Museo de las Americas for a free lecture on that impending doom. Well, that and pottery.

Really, pottery is more the focus -- Museo de las Americas is an art gallery and Namoki is an artist, after all -- but Hopi spirituality is the focus of Namoki's work, and that's where the tie-in lies. "His work speaks of the spirituality of the land," says Museo Director Maruca Salazar, "and his presentation will be about the symbols in his work. You cannot just look at one side of the piece of pottery; the symbology is so intense that just one piece takes a long time to decipher."

Deciphering this could take you all day.

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For his presentation, Namoki will do just that: take a piece of pottery and decipher the symbols within it. According to Salazar, those symbols will have to do with the Hopi prophesy of the end of what the Hopi call "the fourth world" -- i.e., the world we live in. That prophesy involves exactly nine signs, and though we won't go into detail -- we'll save that for Namoki -- they are pretty compelling.

The presentation, which is a part of Museo's From the Earth lecture series, takes place from 2 to 4 p.m. on Saturday, November 6, at Museo de las Americas. The lecture is free and open to the public, but an RSVP is required; email pr@museo.org or call 303-571-4401.