Pottery

Toh-Atin Gallery is fortunate to have an excellent Southwest hand-coiled pottery collection, which includes very fine Navajo, Ute and Pueblo pottery. Among the potters whose work we show currently are Maria Martinez and the Nampeyo and Navasie families. In addition, we carry some very fine Mata Ortiz pottery, including pieces by the Quezada family.

Much of the biographical information on these fine potters has been taken from the three volumes of Pueblo Indian Pottery . . . Artist Biographies by Gregory Schaaf, CIAC Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

This site contains most, but not all, of the Southwest pottery we currently show in the gallery. If you are looking for a special piece or the work of a particular artist, please let us know.

The pottery of the Pueblo indians of the American Southwest is part of a centuries old tradition. The Anasazi of Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon, the ancestors of today's Pueblo people, fashioned beautiful pottery to use in everyday life. Their storage bowls, cups and eating bowls were adorned even though their lifespan was short because of the limitations of low heat firing.

Today, the artists from such Pueblo villages as San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, Acoma, Santo Domingo, Zuni, the Hopi villages and others create beautiful art pottery, not to use, but to celebrate the culture that has survived for centuries. These pots are still made from the natural clay, cleaned and shaped by hand, without the use of a potter's wheel. They are polished using smooth stones and painted with vegetal and clay slips before being fired under piles of sheep manure or pinion wood.

One of the oldest and most collectible of Native American art forms, Pueblo pottery is a testament to the survival of this wonderful culture.

We have included a separate page for Storytellers, as potters from other pueblos, in addition to Cochiti, are now making many of these fine pieces.

The oldest continuously-populated town in the United States lies atop a high mesa in New Mexico. This is the pueblo of Acoma, which looks today much as it did when the Spanish arrived in the 1500s. Acoma Pueblo is well-known for its beautiful white, thin-walled pottery, often with parrots, rainbows and Mimbres figures. Lucy Lewis and her descendants, the Torivio and Chino families are among the most respected families of potters.

San Ildefonso Pueblo is located in north-central New Mexico, and has produced some of the most famous and innovative hand-coiled potters in North America.

Maria and Julian Martinez, their descendants Santana, Adam, Popovi and Tony Da; Blue Corn and Rose Gonzales are well-known innovators in the pottery world. Maria and Julian developed the art of firing to make the first matte black design on polished jet black pottery. Blue Corn is primarily known for her earth-colored highly-polished slips. Rose Gonzales made the first modern carved pottery with distinctive rounded edges. Toh-Atin is privileged to carry pieces by these exceptional artists.

Santa Clara and San Ildefonso have both been known for black pottery for over three centuries.

A Santa Clara tradition is the creation of large storage jars with an indented bear paw design. The near-legendary families of Tafoya, Naranjo, Navasie and Gutierrez continue to make some of the finest pots in the world. Margaret Tafoya, the matriarch of Santa Clara Pueblo potters, passed away in February 2001 at the age of 96.