María Montoya Martínez

Pueblo potter María Montoya Martínez (c. 1881–1980) managed in her long career to almost single-handedly return the fast fading art of traditional Pueblo potting to her people. This accomplishment not only revived cultural pride among the Pueblo, but also gave Martínez the opportunity to teach her skills to others, creating resources that would help sustain the Pueblo community for years to come.

Martínez was born María Antonia Montoya in a pueblo community in San Ildefonso, New Mexico, on an unrecorded date between the years of 1881 and 1887. The San Ildefonso pueblo was a small group of adobe houses on the eastern bank of the Rio Grande. After her birth, Martínez was given the Tewa, or Pueblo, name Po-Ve-Ka, or "Pond Lily" by her mother, Reyes Peña, and her father, Thomas Montoya. She was the second eldest of five daughters supported by her father's varied work as a farmer, a carpenter, and a cowboy.

Received Well-rounded Education

Martínez, a self-taught potter, learned by observing her aunt, a talented potter named Nicolasa Peña. According to Corinne T. Field in the Dictionary of American Biography, Martínez would watch her aunt "roll coils of clay between her moistened hands to form a tall cylinder that she would then push out into a graceful contour, smoothing the finished product with a round stone. Finally the dried pot would be painted in a variety of clay slips and baked in a wood fire." By the age of seven or eight Martínez was making crude bowls and plates of her own. She also attended a government grammar school and received a rudimentary academic education until 1896. At that time she and her sister Desideria were selected by the Pueblo's tribal council to spend two of their formative years at St. Catherine's Indian School in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Martínez eventually returned to her pueblo from St. Catherine's and quickly achieved economic independence by mastering the traditional craft of Pueblo pottery, specializing in coil-built bowls and water jars called ollas. She worked in close partnership with her husband, artist Julian Martínez, a member of her pueblo whom she married in 1904. She crafted, shaped, and polished pots and her husband painted them. The couple traveled briefly to St. Louis, Missouri, as demonstrators of both pottery and traditional dance for the 1904 World's Fair before settling permanently in San Ildefonso to make a living from their craft. They eventually had four sons, Adam, Juan, Tony, and Philip, and a daughter who died in infancy.

Raised Pottery to Art Form

At the time Martínez was born, pottery was made for utilitarian purposes, crafted whenever it was needed for cooking or carrying and storing food and water. Even the making of this functional pottery was losing importance as manufactured and mass-produced crockery was increasingly more available and convenient via non-native traders. The Martínezes started their career crafting small-scale pieces painted in multiple earth-toned colors and sold them as curios from 1908 until 1912. Julian had been taking extra work as a farmer in 1907 when he met archaeologist Edgar Lee Hewitt, a member of the Museum of New Mexico's anthropology and archaeology department. Hewitt was excavating a site in the Frijoles Canyon that had, at one time, been populated by ancestors of the Pueblo, the Anasazis. He recovered, among other artifacts, ancient pottery shards from the plateau at Pajarito near the San Ildefonso pueblo. Julian Martínez participated as one of the native workers hired to help with the excavation, and María was hired to cook for the team conducting the dig. Hewitt, having heard of María's skill as a potter, approached the couple about reconstructing the prehistoric pottery. Martínez accepted the challenge with great energy, and through careful observation and trial and error, she learned how to mix the appropriate clay base to make the thin, highly polished pots of her ancestors. Thrilled with the outcome, Hewitt bought the replicas and encouraged the couple to make more.

In an effort to learn more about the ancient pottery, both María and Julius Martínez worked for a time at the Museum of New Mexico, where Hewitt was exhibiting his finds. María was hired as a pottery demonstrator and Julian as a janitor. In 1912 they perfected a plain, small-scale version of the blackware that would made them famous, using methods that were popular in the first decade of the 20th century. The discovery of this technique was accidental, according to anthropologist Alice Marriott in María: The Potter of San Ildefonso: "The first black pieces produced by Martínez and her husband were the result of an inadvertent smothering of the fire with fine particles of manure toward the end of the burn. The heavy black smoke that was produced penetrated the vessels inside and out, making them a dense black." In 1915 their scale grew and the couple began creating larger black pots. In 1919 they discovered how to produce the silvery black-on-black designs that became their trademark. Julian found that if he painted his design on the polished black pots in slip before they were fired, the result was a shiny black body with muted, black matte designs. The couple provided what many considered to be a perfect balance of craft and art. As an essayist noted in Notable Native Americans, María's "classical shapes were perfectly rendered, her new shapes elegantly proportioned. Julian's decorative designs worked in harmony with the shapes and surfaces. He … rarely repeated decorative drawings except for his famous avanyu, a mythical water serpent, and his feathers, adapted from the prehistoric Mimbres feather designs." In 1921 the Martínezes began teaching others how to make the black-on-black pots, and this sharing of skills and experience created an industry that soon made their pueblo a center for tourism and Native American crafts.

Refined Craft

In 1923 the Martínezes changed their process to reverse the pattern on the pots so that the body of the pot was shiny and the applied design painted in a matte finish on top. That same year at the request of buyers and peers who wanted to be sure they had a true "María Martínez" creation, María began signing her pots despite a Pueblo tradition that viewed works as the result of the efforts of many rather than just one individual. She began by using the anglicized name "Marie," and as time passed the signature changed according to who she was working with. Some were signed "Marie & Julian," others "Poh ve ka," "Marie & Santana," "Maria Poveka," and "Maria/Popovi." The rapid success of the couple's products and the steady influx of non-native tourists and culture introduced Julian to both fame and alcohol, and the pueblo community to increasing tourism. Tragically, Julian Martínex fell victim to alcoholism and died in 1943, leaving his wife to continue potting until well into her late eighties.

The continued popularity of her pottery led eventually to mass production; particularly after Julian's death, family members took up the practice and continued in Martínez's footsteps. Her younger son Tony, who took the Pueblo name Popovi Da, provided the artistic painting for his mother's pots after his father's death. Martínez also collaborated with her older son Adam and his wife, Santana. Martínez retired from active potting in 1971, and in 1974 her family began providing the non-native public with pottery workshops in the summer months at the Idyllwild campus of the University of Southern California.

A Highly Decorated Potter

Martínez was showered with numerous awards during her lifetime. In 1934 she was given a bronze medal for Indian Achievement by the Indian Fire Council, the first woman to receive this award. She was awarded honorary doctorate degrees by four colleges, including the University of New Mexico and the University of Colorado. She was the recipient of the prestigious 1954 Craftsmanship Medallion bestowed by the American Institute of Architects, and that same year she also received the French Palmes Académiques for her contributions to the artistic world. Martínez was honored with the Minnesota Museum of Art's Symbol of Man Award in 1969 and the New Mexico Arts Commission's First Annual Governor's Award in 1974. She was invited to the White House by four U.S. presidents: Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson. She was even asked by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., an avid collector of her work, to lay the cornerstone for the Rockefeller Center in New York City. Martínez's fame was truly international, a fact that was supported by the efforts of Japanese master potter Shoji Hamada and Hong Kong potter Bernard Leach, both of whom traveled to her pueblo to meet her and observe her techniques.

Life after Death

Martínez died on July 20, 1980, in the same San Ildefonso, New Mexico, pueblo where she was born and where she lived most of her life. She was well into her 90s when she passed away, leaving behind a legacy of both her work and her knowledge to enrich generations to come. In the Dictionary of American Biography Field estimated that "The small pieces of black ware which she would have sold at the pueblo for three to six dollars in 1924 brought up to $1,500 in galleries at the time of her death." Martínez's work was continued by her great granddaughter Barbara Gonzales, her grandson Tony Da, her daughter-in-law Santana, and a relative named Blue Corn. Despite the high prices her pots were capable of commanding, Martínez most enjoyed the company of her family and fellow villagers. While her heart may have been tied to her home, her gifts were shared on a much broader level. As Field noted in the Dictionary of American Biography: "When Martínez died in 1980, pottery making was the single most important source of income for the pueblos of the Rio Grande. Largely through her sharing of skills and knowledge, San Ildefonso had been transformed from a poor, remote village to a craft center." Indeed, Martínez's talents as a potter brought to light the artistic beauty of Native crafts and sparked a Native American crafts industry that provided thousands of Americans with a vocation. Her own intentions remained humble, however. As she was quoted as saying by Richard Spivey in his book María: "My Mother Earth gave me this luck. So I'm not going to keep it. I take care of our people."

Books

American West, edited by Howard R. Lamar, Yale University Press, 1998.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Dictionary of American Biography: Supplement 10, Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1995.

Encyclopedia of North American Indians, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996.

Handbook of American Women's History, Sage Publications, 2000.

The Illustrated Biographical Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West, Doubleday, 1976.

Marriott, Alice, María: The Potter of San Ildefonso, University of Oklahoma Press, 1945.

Notable Native Americans, Gale, 1995.

Peterson, Susan, The Living Tradition of María Martínez, Kodansha International, 1989.

Spivey, Richard, María, Northland Publishing, 1979, revised edition, 1989.

Women Artists: An Historical, Contemporary, and Feminist Bibliography, second edition, Scarecrow Press, 1978.

Online

"María Martínez and San Ildefonso Pottery," Maria Pottery Web site,http://www.mariapottery.com/bio/bio (January 14, 2004).

"Susan Peterson on Her Relationship with María Martínez," WETA Web site,http://www.weta.org/productions/legacy/legacy/interview_maria (January 14, 2004).