Blackware, Bloodlines, and Borderlines: Pueblo Pottery as High Art and High Voltage
#nativeamericanheritagemonth
Pueblo pottery is often introduced in art history as a chapter in “Southwest ceramics,” yet for Pueblo communities it is better understood as a dense web of relations between people, clay, ancestors, and place. Clay is not simply a raw material; it is a relative, gathered from known and often restricted locations, prepared in ways that index specific village histories and protocols. Stephen Trimble’s long-term work with potters emphasizes how each pot embodies “talk” between generations, since every stage (clay gathering, tempering, forming, slipping, painting, and firing) is learned in family settings and is indexed to particular landscapes and stories.
Across the Rio Grande and Hopi mesas, this work is structured by lineage. Maria Martinez of San Ildefonso Pueblo learned from older female relatives and in turn taught her sisters, children, and grandchildren, making pottery a core family enterprise rather than an individualistic endeavor. Lucy M. Lewis at Acoma Pueblo similarly recalled watching her great-aunt and other women make pottery for household and ceremonial use, learning by observation rather than formal instruction; she later trained her children and grandchildren, who became accomplished potters in their own right.
Recent Pueblo-led projects sharpen this understanding of pottery as an intergenerational conversation rather than a static “tradition.” The exhibition and catalogue Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery, organized by a Pueblo Pottery Collective of community curators from twenty-one Pueblos and the Navajo Nation, places family knowledge at the center; curators write about specific pots as relatives, as teachers, and as agents in ongoing histories of land loss and cultural resurgence. This framing resonates with Berlo and Phillips’s broader argument that Native North American art must be understood through Indigenous concepts of reciprocity and kinship rather than through Euro-American hierarchies of “fine” versus “applied” arts.
Within this larger field, three intertwined lineages, Hopi-Tewa (Nampeyo’s family), San Ildefonso (the Martinez family), and Acoma (the Lewis family), offer especially rich case studies for thinking about clay as land-based knowledge, gendered labor, and Native intellectual property. Their work stretches from pre-railroad ceramics to contemporary installation, from household ollas to monumental fired and unfired sculptures. It unfolds in constant negotiation with archaeology, anthropology, tourism, museum canons, and global markets.
The term “revival” is routinely applied to early twentieth-century Pueblo pottery, especially Nampeyo’s Sikyatki Revival and Maria and Julian Martinez’s black-on-black ware. Yet archaeological and historical research underscores that Pueblo ceramic technologies and aesthetic systems were never “lost,” even amid colonial disruption. Anna Shepard’s technical study of Pueblo ceramics and subsequent syntheses by Dittert and Plog show a long continuity from Ancestral Pueblo (Anasazi) gray ware and black-on-white pottery through to later polychrome wares, with shifts in temper, firing, and paint reflecting social reorganization, missionization, and trade.
Spanish and later Mexican colonialism introduced new demands and forms. Mission churches required large storage jars, baptismal vessels, and architectural ornament, which Pueblo potters produced alongside their own ritual and household pottery. In some villages, glazes and painted motifs shifted under ecclesiastical influence even as older iconographies persisted on interior or “hidden” surfaces. Archaeologists have traced changing glaze recipes and vessel forms in mission-period wares as responses to both religious coercion and pragmatic needs.
By the late nineteenth century, the most intense pressure came from tourism and anthropology. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, the Fred Harvey Company, and institutions such as the Smithsonian, the Penn Museum, and Harvard’s Peabody Museum actively collected Pueblo pottery as evidence of a “vanishing” culture, while simultaneously encouraging production for curio shops and hotels such as the Hopi House at Grand Canyon. At Hopi, so-called Polacca polychrome jars made in the late 1800s, such as the Polacca Polychrome jar attributed to Nampeyo in the National Museum of the American Indian collection, display thin-walled forms and painted bird motifs that already navigate between household use, ritual meaning, and tourist desire.
The Metropolitan Museum’s Polacca Polychrome Water Jar (ca. 1895–1900) made by Nampeyo encapsulates this moment. Its form and overall design allude to earlier Hopi wares, yet it was likely produced for a collector or tourist rather than village storage. Berlo and Phillips note that such objects sat uneasily between ethnographic specimen and “art” in museum taxonomies, a tension that would frame later narratives of “revival.”
Ethnographers in the early twentieth century consistently observed that pottery in Pueblo communities was rooted in women’s domestic work. Ruth Bunzel’s classic study The Pueblo Potter documents women gathering clay, coiling pots, and painting designs while also cooking, caring for children, and managing household ritual obligations. For Maria Martinez, this gendered training began with her aunt Nicolasa Montoya at San Ildefonso. Lucy Lewis similarly learned as a young girl by watching older Acoma women, while balancing farming and household labor.
Yet the story is not one of exclusive female authorship. At San Ildefonso, Julian Martinez’s role as painter and designer was crucial to the development of black-on-black pottery. The Metropolitan Museum notes that between 1917 and 1943 Maria shaped the vessels while Julian painted matte designs, both drawing on archaeological shards from the Pajarito Plateau and on motifs such as avanyu (water serpent) that carried longstanding Tewa meanings. In Acoma families, men might assist with clay gathering and firing even if coiling and painting remained coded as women’s work.
The politics of naming and signature overlays this gendered division of labor. For much of the nineteenth century, museums catalogued Pueblo pottery under generic labels (“San Ildefonso jar”) rather than artists’ names. Denver Art Museum’s Jar (formerly attributed simply to “San Ildefonso”) was only later identified in 1954 by Maria herself as a collaborative work; she had formed the vessel, and Julian had painted it. Such retroactive identifications underscore how institutional records can erase specific women’s labor even as Pueblo communities remember it.
Signatures emerged as an explicit practice only in the twentieth century, catalyzed by tourism, exhibitions, and, later, the regulatory environment created by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board. Maria Martinez was among the first Pueblo potters to sign her work, sometimes as “Marie” or “Marie + Julian,” a practice that helped authenticate pots in distant markets but also foregrounded her individual fame. Lucy Lewis began signing “Lucy M. Lewis, Acoma, N.M.” after winning major prizes in the 1950s, a move that was controversial within Acoma because it seemed to claim a communal style as individual property. In parallel, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990, a truth-in-advertising law enforced by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, made names and tribal affiliations legally significant markers of authenticity in the marketplace.
These naming practices both protect artisans from fraud and risk simplifying complex networks of collaboration. The signatures “Maria/Popovi” or “Nampeyo/Fannie” signal intergenerational co-authorship, yet museum wall labels and auction catalogues often highlight only one “master” name.
Nampeyo of Hano (Hopi-Tewa, ca. 1859–1942) stands at the center of narratives about Pueblo pottery modernism. Born in the Tewa village of Hano on First Mesa, she began as a maker of Polacca ware but became renowned for reworking designs from fourteenth–sixteenth-century Sikyatki pottery excavated on nearby ruins. Archaeologist Jesse Walter Fewkes’s digs at Sikyatki in the 1890s produced large quantities of sherds, some of which he shared with Nampeyo; she also gathered shards herself from the abandoned village.
The National Museum of the American Indian’s celebrated polychrome jar with migration pattern, featured in its Infinity of Nations exhibit, exemplifies her Sikyatki Revival style. The swirling avian wings and abstracted feathers encircle the vessel in a continuous movement that references Hopi migration histories and water, while the low, wide, impeccably balanced form recalls ancient examples. The Metropolitan Museum’s Polacca Polychrome Water Jar, slightly earlier in date, shows Nampeyo moving away from thinly slipped Polacca ware toward the more robust Sikyatki-inspired shapes and dense motifs that would define her mature work.
Smarthistory’s analysis of these works emphasizes how deeply this “revival” was mediated by tourism and archaeology. Nampeyo’s pots were sold through the Hopi House at Grand Canyon and other Fred Harvey outlets, and her photograph circulated in railroad brochures as a living emblem of the Southwest. The Sikyatki Revival thus emerges not as a simple recovery of lost motifs but as a creative recomposition in which an Indigenous artist responds to archaeological collections, market demand, and her own community’s narrative traditions. As scholars have noted, this recomposition also allowed Tewa and Hopi visual knowledge to persist under the gaze of anthropology without being fully decipherable by outsiders.
The Sikyatki Revival did not end with Nampeyo’s lifetime; it was extended and transformed by her descendants, especially her youngest daughter, Fannie Nampeyo (1900–1987). Fannie’s jar in the Cleveland Museum of Art, with a bold migration pattern wrapping around a globular form, demonstrates how she standardized family motifs while refining line quality and symmetry. A jar by Fannie in the National Museum of the American Indian’s collection, dated 1963, similarly features migration designs and is explicitly attributed to her as artist, underscoring the increasing individuation of authorship in this lineage.
The Arizona State Museum’s Nampeyo Showcase has documented collaborative jars signed or attributed to “Nampeyo/Fannie,” where the older potter formed the vessel by touch after losing her sight and her daughter painted the designs. These works, alongside a related migration jar in the Elkus Collection, complicate neat distinctions between “original” and “revivalist,” showing design as a shared, iterative process.
Later generations, such as Dextra Quotskuyva (Dextra Quotskuwa Nampeyo) and James G. Nampeyo, have continued to experiment with family motifs. A Hopi-Tewa jar by Dextra in the Heard Museum, documented in the Highsmith Archive at the Library of Congress, scales up family forms and combines precise painted patterning with sculptural confidence. James Nampeyo’s polychrome migration-pattern jars, marketed through Native art galleries, reiterate the motif with subtle shifts in rim treatment and negative space, speaking to the demands of contemporary collectors as well as village aesthetics.
Cleveland Museum and other institutional texts stress that the migration pattern itself has “great longevity in the family,” signifying both water and the long journeys of Hopi clans. At the same time, auction catalogues and art criticism sometimes detach this design from its narrative and ritual contexts, treating it as a brand marker of “Nampeyo style.” The family’s ongoing work, including more experimental pieces by contemporary descendants, can be read as efforts to reclaim control over how these designs circulate and how they are named.
At San Ildefonso, Maria (Poveka) Martinez (1887–1980) and Julian Martinez (1879–1943) similarly transformed a local ceramic tradition into a globally recognized art form. Drawing inspiration from ancient black-on-black shards unearthed near the pueblo by archaeologists in 1907–9, the couple developed a new technique of firing red-slipped pots in a reduction atmosphere to create a deep black surface, and then using selective burnishing and matte slip painting to articulate designs. The Metropolitan Museum’s Black-on-Black Jar emphasizes that this process was perfected collaboratively. Maria shaped and burnished the vessels and Julian painted eagle feathers, avanyu, clouds, and other motifs in matte black.
Numerous works trace the arc of their experimentation. The National Museum of Women in the Arts’ Jar, made by Maria and Julian, shows a high-shouldered form with a band of matte design against a gleaming surface, while the Philbrook Museum’s black-on-black jar, featured in NMWA’s Legacy of Generations exhibition, scales this vocabulary up to a commanding 17 x 22 inches. A black-on-black bowl and plate in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection reveal how their work resonated with contemporaneous Art Deco design, combining ancestral motifs with modernist abstraction.
Maria’s growing fame was nurtured not only by her technical prowess but by a carefully constructed “studio potter” persona. She traveled widely to demonstrate pottery-making at world’s fairs, museums, and department stores; the NMWA’s New Ground and related essays describe how photographer Laura Gilpin helped shape a visual narrative of Maria as both tradition bearer and modern artist. Smarthistory’s account likewise stresses that her work reframed Native ceramics as fine art in the eyes of non-Native institutions, even as she continued to live and work within the kinship structures of San Ildefonso.
This visibility brought benefits and distortions. Museums sometimes credited pieces solely to “Maria,” even when they were painted by Julian or, later, by their daughter-in-law Santana. The Denver Art Museum’s Jar, which Maria herself identified in 1954 as a joint work, is emblematic. The correction of authorship depended on the artist’s own testimony decades after acquisition.
The Martinez family legacy illustrates how a Pueblo lineage can function as an art school, technical laboratory, and brand. After Julian’s death, Maria worked with her son Adam and his wife Santana, then with another son, Popovi Da (Antonio Martinez), who emerged as a major innovator in his own right. The article Black-on-Black Ware and gallery and museum materials note that Popovi Da perfected “gunmetal” finishes by precisely timing the reduction phase of firing, and he introduced sienna effects by exposing portions of the pot to oxygen, as well as pioneering turquoise and shell inlay and sgraffito carving. A jar by Maria and Popovi Da in the NMAI collection, as well as cream-on-red and sienna jars documented by the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, show the family moving beyond the canonical black-on-black while maintaining technical rigor.
Popovi’s son, Tony Da (1940–2008), extended this trajectory into sculptural and hyper-refined forms. A red jar with sgraffito avanyu and inlaid turquoise, and an avanyu jar with shell heishi and turquoise inlay, documented by Adobe Gallery and Andrea Fisher Pottery, demonstrate how Tony fused family firing techniques with inlaid stones and complex carving, pushing Pueblo pottery toward a studio-sculpture idiom while remaining rooted in San Ildefonso iconography.
Parallel branches in the extended family include Blue Corn (Crucita Gonzales Calabaza), known for richly colored polychrome and micaceous wares that reinterpreted San Ildefonso feathers and rain motifs, and contemporary potter Russell Sanchez, whose highly polished black-and-sienna jars with inset turquoise and coral have become touchstones of twenty-first-century Pueblo ceramics. Auction records and gallery catalogues trace how these works circulate in a growing global market, where provenance connecting them to the Martinez lineage is a key driver of value.
Institutionally, exhibitions such as Maria Martinez: Five Generations of Potters, Maria & Modernism, and NMWA’s The Legacy of Generations have framed this family as a modernist dynasty, situating their pots alongside Euro-American modernism and photography. These narratives have helped secure recognition for Pueblo pottery as modern art, even as they risk overshadowing other potting families at San Ildefonso and beyond.
While the Nampeyo and Martinez families worked in polychrome and black-on-black respectively, Acoma potter Lucy M. Lewis (ca. 1890s–1992) became renowned for reviving and transforming ancient black-on-white designs from Mimbres and Ancestral Pueblo ceramics. The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Jar with Fine-line Design and the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ Jar both show Lucy’s hallmark; thin-walled ollas with extremely precise black geometric or zoomorphic motifs on a white kaolin slip. Museum texts emphasize that she gathered gray Acoma clay and white slip from specific Acoma lands, coiled vessels by hand, then scraped and burnished them to a remarkable delicacy before painting freehand with a yucca brush.
Lucy’s designs draw extensively on shards and ancient motifs she encountered on walks around Acoma. Essays from The Magazine Antiques and other sources explain how she incorporated and expanded patterns from Mimbres bowls and Chacoan sherds, making her clay literally and figuratively “made of the past” by tempering with ground potsherds. Works such as an Acoma fine-line jar and heartline deer jars documented by Adobe Gallery highlight her ability to translate petroglyph and mural imagery (animals, lightning, rainbirds) into densely structured yet visually balanced surfaces.
At the same time, Lucy participated in the same tourist and competition circuits as her contemporaries. She first gained broad attention after winning a blue ribbon at the Gallup Intertribal Ceremonial in 1950, after which she began signing her work and selling to collectors and museums. Her pots now reside in major collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Bowers Museum, and the Montclair Art Museum, where they are often presented as canonical examples of Acoma fine-line style.
Lucy’s impact is inseparable from her role as matriarch of a potting family. Her daughters Emma Lewis Mitchell, Dolores Lewis Garcia, Mary Lewis Garcia, and Carmel Lewis Haskaya all became accomplished potters, as did later descendants. Emma’s miniature jars with tightly painted Mimbres bee and flower designs, such as works in the Gorman Museum and Beach Museum of Art, demonstrate how next generations maintained thin walls and precise linework while playing with scale and figural motifs. Dolores’s and other family members’ works similarly adapt fine-line and lightning patterns to new proportions and color accents, responding to collector demand while keeping core Acoma visual grammar intact.
Lucy’s biography notes that some community members objected when she began to sign her pots, feeling that communal designs should not be claimed by a single person. This tension persists as her descendants navigate the tourist and collector market. Auction records and gallery descriptions frequently emphasize signatures, dates, and familial ties to Lucy as value markers. At the same time, recent essays by Acoma potter Claudia Mitchell, Lucy’s granddaughter, published in connection with Grounded in Clay, reclaim these lineages as living, locally accountable practices rather than purely market-facing brands.
Though the Nampeyo, Martinez, and Lewis lineages emerge from different pueblos, their careers are entangled through shared institutions, collectors, and anthropological frameworks. Works by Nampeyo and her descendants, Maria and Julian and their descendants, and Lucy Lewis and her family have been shown together in exhibitions such as The Legacy of Generations: Pottery by American Indian Women (NMWA), Generations in Clay: Pueblo Pottery of the American Southwest, and Grounded in Clay. These shows highlight both stylistic dialogues and shared experiences of negotiating museum canons and tourist expectations.
Art-historical accounts sometimes narrate a linear progression from “utilitarian” household pottery to “art” through the interventions of a few named geniuses (Nampeyo, Maria, Lucy) yet close attention to their family structures and to Pueblo commentary reveals a more complex, lateral conversation. The black-on-black ware explicitly links San Ildefonso blackware to a broader Pueblo ceramic field, noting that the modern black-on-black style emerged in part in response to both archaeological stimuli and the example of Hopi modernists such as Nampeyo. Conversely, contemporary Hopi and Acoma potters borrow firing experiments and market strategies from San Ildefonso, while maintaining their own forms and designs.
Anthropology has been both a constraint and a resource in these conversations. Bunzel’s The Pueblo Potter and later ethnographies offered detailed analyses of design fields, motif transformations, and potters’ comments, but often framed Pueblo artists within primitivist paradigms of “creative imagination” in “primitive art.” More recent Pueblo-authored essays in Grounded in Clay and other venues critique these framings, insisting on pottery as a contemporary intellectual and political practice. Exhibition catalogues for Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists and Maria & Modernism likewise pair canonical pots with Indigenous feminist and modernist readings that center women’s authority and land-based knowledge.
The art-historical canonization of Nampeyo, Maria and Julian, and Lucy Lewis has had complex consequences. On one hand, their inclusion in major collections (The Met, NMAI, NMWA, Cleveland Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Bowers Museum, and others) has forced museums and art history survey texts to acknowledge Pueblo ceramics as central to North American modernism, not merely as ethnographic artifacts. Exhibitions like New Ground: The Southwest of Maria Martinez and Laura Gilpin show how Pueblo pottery and photography collaboratively shaped modern visions of the U.S. Southwest.
On the other hand, focusing canon formation around a few “masters” can obscure the collective nature of Pueblo art-making and underplay other lineages; such as the Tafoya family of Santa Clara, the many Cochiti storytellers, or lesser-known potters whose works populate mission churches and family homes but not museum galleries. The black-on-black ware article and related museum resources list numerous San Ildefonso and Santa Clara potters (Santana and Adam Martinez, Carmelita Dunlap, Rose and Angela Gonzales, among others) whose work is critical to the development of the style but less publicized.
Market dynamics amplify these disparities. Galleries such as Adobe Gallery, King Galleries, and Native Pots, as well as the now-closed Indian Craft Shop and the Indian Pueblo Store in Albuquerque, promote named artists and family brands, often privileging those already canonized in museums. While these markets provide crucial income and visibility, they also subject Pueblo potters to collectors’ expectations about “traditional” forms, motifs, and signatures. The challenge for artists has been to work within and against these expectations; to innovate without having their work dismissed as “nontraditional,” and to protect sacred or restricted designs from reproduction.
Contemporary Pueblo ceramics extend these lineages into sculptural, installation, and explicitly political work. Trimble’s updated Talking with the Clay and recent exhibitions such as Ceramics in the Expanded Field at MASS MoCA document how Pueblo potters have embraced new clay bodies, industrial materials, and mixed-media installations while retaining deep ties to land and community.
Santa Clara sculptor Roxanne Swentzell (b. 1962) exemplifies this expansion. Her monumental Mud Woman Rolls On (2011) at the Denver Art Museum is an unfired/fired clay and plant-fiber sculpture over ten feet tall, depicting a mother figure embracing four children of different ages. Made with local soil from Denver and micaceous clays from northern New Mexico, the work functions as a storyteller figure, greeting visitors at the entrance to the Native arts galleries and embodying the transmission of knowledge “rolling on” across generations. The piece is both rooted in Pueblo storyteller traditions and resolutely contemporary in scale, materiality, and museological presence.
Rose B. Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo, b. 1983), daughter of potter Roxanne Swentzell, extends family clay practices into architectural installation and public sculpture. Her Dream House (2022) at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia is a multi-room installation constructed with ceramic, textile, and video elements, inspired by Pueblo architecture and her ancestral landscape. Simpson has also created large outdoor installations such as Counterculture, a series of ten-foot-tall cast-concrete figures adorned with ceramic and found objects, originally installed at Field Farm in Massachusetts and later shown at the John Michael Kohler Art Center and the Whitney Museum. These works situate Pueblo ceramic lineages in dialogue with land rights, histories of Indigenous removal, and urban public space.
Within the more vessel-based arena, potters such as Russell Sanchez at San Ildefonso and numerous younger Acoma, Hopi, and Kewa artists continue to innovate with micaceous clay, inlay, and experimental firing. Sanchez’s highly polished black-and-sienna jars with inset turquoise and coral, for example, explicitly reference clan structures and ceremonial colors even as they play with modernist form and luxury materials. Talking with the Clay’s revised edition showcases similar innovations across pueblos, from sculptural figures to political works addressing environmental contamination and water rights.
As Pueblo pottery has become a global contemporary art form, questions of sovereignty and intellectual property have taken on new urgency. The Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 (and its amendments) functions as a truth-in-advertising law, making it illegal to market art as “Indian made” or as the product of a specific tribe if it is not. This has been crucial in combatting counterfeit “Native-style” pottery, but it does not in itself protect specific design motifs, stories, or ceremonial knowledge from appropriation.
Internationally, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has framed these issues under the concept of Traditional Cultural Expressions (TCEs); forms in which traditional cultures are expressed, such as designs, symbols, and art. Legal scholars and Indigenous advocates debate how best to protect TCEs, balancing concerns about over-commodification with the need to prevent exploitative use by fashion brands, museums, or non-Native artists.
For Pueblo potters, these global debates intersect with longstanding internal protocols. Many designs, such as Hopi katsina imagery or certain kiva patterns, are restricted or require permission from religious authorities before being placed on pots destined for sale. Others, like the migration pattern or Acoma fine-line designs, are widely used but still understood as tied to specific histories and teachings. Artists sometimes choose to withhold certain motifs or to modify them when working for external markets, exercising cultural sovereignty over what is shared.
Contemporary installation works by artists like Simpson and Swentzell engage these issues at a conceptual level, using clay bodies and architectural forms to assert Indigenous presence in spaces, from the Denver Art Museum to Madison Square Park, that have historically marginalized Native art. At the same time, Pueblo potters and cultural institutions such as the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, Indian Pueblo Store, and tribal arts and crafts boards are developing guidelines and educational materials to help collectors, designers, and museums engage respectfully with Pueblo pottery and designs.
Taken together, the Nampeyo, Martinez, and Lewis lineages reveal Pueblo pottery as a living, contested, and profoundly relational field. Their histories show that what art history has labeled “revivals” are, from Pueblo perspectives, continuities under pressure; moments when families reworked ancestral designs and techniques in response to archaeological incursions, tourist markets, and new legal regimes, while still grounding their work in land-based knowledge and kinship.
Women’s central role in these lineages challenges stereotypes that separate “craft” from “art” and domestic labor from authorship. The politics of naming and signature, whether in “Marie + Julian,” “Nampeyo/Fannie,” or “Lucy M. Lewis, Acoma, N.M.”, foreground questions about who is seen, who is credited, and how communal visual knowledge is translated into the individualizing structures of the art market and museum catalogues.
At the same time, contemporary potters and artist-sculptors demonstrate that Pueblo pottery is not bounded by the vessel. Large-scale works like Mud Woman Rolls On and Dream House, and intricate experimental jars by artists such as Tony Da and Russell Sanchez, extend clay into architecture, performance, and installation, while continuing to speak in Pueblo visual languages.
Across these histories, Pueblo potters engage not only with clay but with anthropology, canon formation, law, and global capitalism. In doing so, they assert sovereignty over style and story, insisting that Pueblo pottery is not a relic of the past but a site of ongoing intellectual, aesthetic, and political work.
References:
Adobe Gallery. Acoma Pueblo Heartline Deer Pottery Jar by Lucy Lewis. Adobe Gallery, https://www.adobegallery.com/art/acoma-pueblo-heartline-deer-pottery-jar-lucy-lewis.
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National Museum of the American Indian. Nampeyo, Polychrome Jar (Migration Pattern), Infinity of Nations. NMAI, https://americanindian.si.edu/exhibitions/infinityofnations/southwest/264462.html.
National Museum of the American Indian. Polacca Polychrome Jar, attributed to Nampeyo. NMAI Collections Search, https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/object/ark:/65665/ws67e3c234f.
National Museum of the American Indian. Black-on-black Plate, Maria and Julian Martinez. NMAI Collections Search, https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/object/NMAI_265300.
National Museum of the American Indian. Jar, Maria Poveka Martinez and Popovi Da. NMAI Collections Search, https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/object/NMAI_281424.
National Museum of Women in the Arts. Jar, Lucy M. Lewis. NMWA Collection, https://nmwa.org/art/collection/lewis-jar/.
National Museum of Women in the Arts. Jar, Maria and Julian Martinez. NMWA Collection, https://nmwa.org/art/collection/martinez-jar/.
National Museum of Women in the Arts. Lucy M. Lewis, Artist Profile. NMWA, https://nmwa.org/art/artists/lucy-m-lewis/.
National Museum of Women in the Arts. Maria Martinez, Artist Profile and New Ground: The Southwest of Maria Martinez and Laura Gilpin. NMWA, https://nmwa.org/art/artists/maria-martinez/ and https://nmwa.org/blog/artist-spotlight/artist-spotlight-maria-martinez/.
National Museum of Women in the Arts. The Legacy of Generations: Pottery by American Indian Women. NMWA, https://nmwa.org/exhibitions/the-legacy-of-generations-pottery-by-american-indian-women/.
Penn Museum. Pueblo Pottery in the Collections of the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Penn Museum, https://www.penn.museum/sites/pennexhibits.
Popovi Da. Eyes of the Pot: Popovi Da. Eyes of the Pot, https://www.eyesofthepot.com/san-ildefonso/popovi-da.php.
Rose B. Simpson. Dream House and related exhibitions. ICA Boston, MASS MoCA, and Trustees of Reservations, including Ceramics in the Expanded Field and Counterculture. See https://massmoca.org/event/curatorial-roundtable-rose-b-simpson-in-new-england/, https://thetrustees.org/exhibit/counterculture/, https://whitney.org/exhibitions/rose-simpson-counterculture, and Jessica Silverman Gallery biography at https://jessicasilvermangallery.com/online-shows/rose-b-simpson-skeena/.
Shepard, Anna O. Ceramics for the Archaeologist. Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1956. https://babel.hathitrust.org.
Smarthistory. Nampeyo (Hopi-Tewa), Polacca Polychrome Water Jar. Smarthistory and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://smarthistory.org/nampeyo-polacca-water-jar/.
Smarthistory. Nampeyo (Hopi-Tewa), Polychrome Jar. Smarthistory and National Museum of the American Indian, https://smarthistory.org/nampeyo-hopi-tewa-polychrome-jar/.
Smarthistory. Puebloan: Maria Martinez, Black-on-black Ceramic Vessel. Smarthistory, https://smarthistory.org/puebloan-maria-martinez-black-on-black-ceramic-vessel/.
Smithsonian American Art Museum. Bowl, Maria and Julian Martinez. SAAM, https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/bowl-16386.
Smithsonian American Art Museum. Plate, Maria and Julian Martinez. SAAM, https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/plate-16387.
Smithsonian American Art Museum. Lucy M. Lewis, Artist Biography. SAAM, https://americanart.si.edu/artist/lucy-m-lewis-2919.
Smithsonian Institution. Maria Martinez: Five Generations of Potters. Smithsonian Exhibitions, https://www.si.edu/exhibitions/maria-martinez-five-generations-potters.
Trimble, Stephen. Talking with the Clay: The Art of Pueblo Pottery. 20th Anniversary Revised Edition, School for Advanced Research Press, 2007. https://sarpress.org/talking-with-the-clay-20th-anniversary-revised-edition/ and https://www.unmpress.com/9781930618787/talking-with-the-clay/.
U.S. Department of the Interior. Indian Craft Shop (historical site). Indian Craft Shop, https://www.indiancraftshop.com/.
Vilcek Foundation. Pueblo Pottery: Stories in Clay. Vilcek Foundation, https://vilcek.org/events/pueblo-pottery-stories-in-clay/.
WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization). Traditional Cultural Expressions. WIPO, https://www.wipo.int/en/web/traditional-knowledge/traditional-cultural-expressions/index and Intellectual Property and Traditional Cultural Expressions/Traditional Knowledge, https://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/tk/913/wipo_pub_913.pdf.
WIPO. Using Traditional Cultural Expressions in Fashion. WIPO, https://www.wipo.int/en/web/traditional-knowledge/fashion.
The Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990: Fit for Purpose?. Center for Art Law, https://itsartlaw.org/art-law-history/the-indian-arts-and-crafts-act-of-1990-fit-for-purpose/.
Preservation or Protection? The Intellectual Property Debate Surrounding Traditional Cultural Expressions. Harvard Law School Association for Law and Policy, https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/halo/2025/03/13/preservation-or-protection-the-intellectual-property-debate-surrounding-traditional-cultural-expressions/.
Using Intellectual Property to Protect Traditional Cultural Expressions. Denver Journal of International Law and Policy, https://djilp.org/a-balancing-act-using-intellectual-property-to-protect-traditional-cultural-expressions/.
I was excited to read this piece and learn about my nearby neighbors of the San Ildefonso Pueblo! I had no idea the striking black-on-black style, which is displayed often around the Pajarito Plateau, was a rediscovery of an older tradition.
Speaking of installations, my town (White Rock), which I often describe as "like someone dropped a Midwest suburb onto a mountain in New Mexico," has one major one, and it's of San Ildefonso pottery, in case you haven't seen it: https://publicartarchive.org/art/San-Ildefonso-Artists-for-the-White-Rock-Pottery-Replica-Project/646cb6fe. As a bedroom community of what is basically a company town, there isn't much that gives the town a sense of place, but I think this installation does that.