Maria Martinez

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

Embarrassed that she could not create high quality black pots in the style of the ancient Pueblo peoples, Martinez hid her pots away from the world. A few years later, Hewett and his guests visited the little Tewa Pueblo. These guests asked to purchase black ware pottery, similar to Martinez's pots housed in the museum (Peterson, 90). She was greatly encouraged by this interest and resolutely began trying to perfect the art of black ware pottery. Her skill advanced with each pot, and her art began to cause quite a stir among collectors and developed into a business for the black ware pottery. In addition, Martinez began experimenting with various techniques to produce other shapes and colorful forms of pottery. Julian Martinez, Maria's husband, began attempting to decorate the pots she made. Although Julian did eventually master decorating techniques for Maria’s pots, the process consisted of many trials and errors. "To create his designs, a paint (slip) is created and applied to the already burnished, but yet unfired surface. You cannot polish a design into a matte background, as the stone is not as precise as a brush is. He discovered that after the guaco juice burned out from the heat of the fire, he could mix the guaco with clay which then provided the perfect paint for his decorations. The process Julian settled on was to polish the background first, then matte paint the decoration in the negative.

In 1918, Julian finished the first decorated black ware pot with a matte background and a polished Avanyu design. (Still achieved by painting the background on an already burnished surface). Although black ware pottery received a lot of success, the true legend behind the pottery is Maria Martinez herself. She won many awards and presented her pottery at many world fairs and received the initial grant for the National Endowment for the Arts to fund a Martinez pottery workshop in 1973. Martinez passed on her knowledge and skill to many others including her family.