Craft: An American History

by Glenn Adamson

In later years, the famed potters Maria and Julian Martinez, of the Tewa-speaking pueblo at San Ildefonso, were much in demand as demonstrators. They first performed at the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, and spent a whole year at the Panama-California Exposition in San Diego in 1915, bringing sacks of sand and clay to use. In 1934 the ceramic manufacturer Haeger Potteries brought them to the Chicago Century of Progress International Exposition, making an explicit juxtaposition between their “primitive” craft and modern industrial techniques. Like Nampeyo, the Martinezes drew inspiration from shards found in archaeological digs. They had initially made polychrome wares, not very different from those of other Pueblo potters, with Maria forming the pots and Julian decorating them. The iconic blackware so strongly associated with them today began as research experiments meant to determine how certain historic pots were achieved. The answer lay in a “smothered” reduction firing that smoked the surface, turning the red clay black, a process they discovered in 1910. The effect was further refined through the addition of volcanic ash to the clay body and through selective scraping and polishing.