Potter woman - Maria Martinez

 

Maria Poveka Montoya Martinez (c. 1887 – July 20, 1980) was a Puebloan artist who created internationally known pottery.

 Martinez (born Maria Poveka Montoya), her husband Julian, and other family members, including her son Popovi Da, examined traditional Pueblo pottery styles and techniques to create pieces which reflect the Pueblo people's legacy of fine artwork and crafts. The works of Maria Martinez, and especially her black ware pottery, are in the collections of many museums, including the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, and more.

Maria Martinez 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 Nicolasa and recalls this "learning by seeing" starting at age eleven, as she watched her aunt, grandmother, and father's cousin work on their pottery during the 1890s. 

During this time, Spanish tinware and Anglo enamelware had become readily available in the Southwestern United States, making the creation of traditional cooking and serving pots less necessary. Traditional pottery-making techniques were becoming less common, but Martinez and her family experimented with different techniques and helped preserve the cultural art.

[Two archaeologists] ...encouraged local potters to recreate the ancient pots that were found near the pueblo from 1907 to 1909, and [ ] saw [Maria] as the perfect Pueblo potter to bring this idea to life. This work was distinct from, but invariably confused with (in the popular narrative) the matte black on polished blackware that Maria and her husband experimented with and perfected on their own and for which there was no prior precedent, contrary to popular myth.

After much trial and error, Maria successfully produced a black ware pot. The first pots for a museum were fired around 1913. These pots were undecorated, unsigned, and of a generally rough quality. The earliest record of this pottery was in a July 1920 exhibition held at the New Mexico Museum of Art.

Creating black ware pottery is a long process that consists of many steps requiring patience and skill. Six distinct processes occur before the pot is finished. According to Susan Peterson in The Living Tradition of Maria Martinez, these steps include, "finding and collecting the clay, forming a pot, scraping and sanding the pot to remove surface irregularities, applying the iron-bearing slip and burnishing it to a high sheen with a smooth stone, decorating the pot with another slip, and firing the pot.

Maria and Julian decorating pottery 1912.

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When I was studying ceramics in art school at college I tried making the black on black technique - the stone smoothing of the surface took a very long time, and then it was fired in a pit fire. Unfortunately my pot broke in the firing.

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Today's quote:

Sometimes finding the answer is as easy as taking a break and stepping back from the situation.