Ready to Paint Pottery

Maria Martinez (1887 – 1980) was a Native American artist who created internationally known pottery. more...

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Martinez (born Maria Antonia Montoya), her husband Julian, and other family members examined traditional Pueblo pottery styles and techniques to create pieces which reflect the Pueblo people’s legacy of fine artwork and crafts.

Maria was from the San Ildefonso Pueblo, a community located 20 miles northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico. At an early age, she learned pottery skills from her aunt. During this time, Spanish tinware and Anglo enamelware had become readily available in the Southwest, making the creation of traditional cooking and serving pots less necessary. The art of traditional pottery making was in jeopardy of extinction. Fortunately, Maria continued her interest in the fine art, and experimented with different techniques.

Discovery

An excavation, in 1908, led by Edgar Lee Hewett, a professor of archaeology and the director of the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, discovered examples of black-on-black pottery. While searching through the sandy dirt and red clay of the New Mexico desert terrain, broken pieces of polished, jet-black pottery were uncovered (Peterson 89). At this time, few people were aware that during the Neolithic period, the Pueblo peoples crafted this style of finished ware. The Historical Pottery of the Pueblo Indians 1600-1800 text states that the finished ... pottery held a glossy, melted appearance which was only used for decoration on the pots (Frank and Harlow, 8). Sometime during the end of the 1700’s, the use of plant pigments and finely powdered mineral substances became the preferred technique of painting and slowly caused the extinction of glazed pottery (Frank and Harlow, 8).

Hewett sought a skilled pueblo potter who could re-create this ancient pottery style. His intention was to place re-created pots in museums and thus preserve the ancient art form. Maria Martinez was known in the Tewa pueblo of San Ildefonso, New Mexico for making the thinnest pots in the fastest amount of time. Hewett saw her as the perfect Pueblo potter to bring his idea to life (Peterson, 90).

Challenges and Experiments

A long process of experimentation was required to successfully recreate the black-on-black pottery style to meet Maria’s exacting standards. There were many challenges. As almost all clay found in the New Mexico desert was red, one specific challenge was to figure out a way to dye the red clay jet black. Maria discovered that smothering the fire surrounding the pottery during the firing process caused the smoke to be trapped. The carbon in the smoke caused the pottery to turn to a black ash color (Hyde 20-23). She experimented with the idea that an unfired polished red vessel which was painted with a certain paint on top of the polish and then fired in a smudging fire at a relatively cool temperature would result in a deep glossy black background with dull black decoration (Frank and Harlow 36). Shards or sheep and horse manure placed around the outside and inside of the outdoor kiva-style adobe oven would give the pot a slicker matte finished appearance (Hyde 20). After much trial and error, Maria successfully produced a black ware pot. The first pots for the museum were fired around 1910. These pots were undecorated, unsigned, and of a generally rough quality (Peterson 90).

Read more at Wikipedia.org