page_title: Maria Martinez
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Maria Martinez / History
caption_attribution_description: A pot by Native American artist Maria Martinez, approximately 1945, on display at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Photo by Jim Heaphy.
context_page_description: Maria Montoya Martinez was a Native American artist who created internationally known pottery. Martinez, her husband Julian, and other family members 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, survive in many museums, including the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, and more. The Penn Museum in Philadelphia holds eight vessels – three plates and five jars – signed either "Marie" or "Marie & Julian".
  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 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 Southwest, making the creation of traditional cooking and serving pots less necessary.
context_section_description: During an excavation in 1908 led by Edgar Lee Hewett, a professor of archaeology and the founder and director of the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe, examples of black-on-white Biscuit Ware pottery were discovered. While searching through the sandy dirt and red clay of the New Mexico desert terrain, broken pieces of biscuit ware were uncovered. (The term biscuit ware was first applied by Kidder (1915) to describe the distinct pottery from Classic period ruins in the Pajarito Plateau and Santa Fe Valley. While biscuit wares appear to have developed directly out of Santa Fe Black-on-white and Wiyo Black-on-white, biscuit wares exhibit characteristics that are quite distinct from earlier pottery types.
  It is a common misconception that, "during the end of the 18th century, the use of plant pigments and finely powdered mineral substances became the preferred technique of painting and slowly caused the extinction of glazed pottery". 
  In reality, the nearby inhabitants of Santa Clara Pueblo, were still producing the highly burnished black pottery, since the 1600s, though it had fallen into virtual disuse by the 1900s preceded by a decline in the finish.
  Hewett sought a skilled pueblo potter who could re-create Biscuit Ware. His intention was to place re-created pots in museums and thus preserve the ancient art form. Maria Martinez was known in the Tewa pueblo of San Ildefonso, New Mexico for making the thinnest pots in the least time; therefore, Hewett saw her as the perfect Pueblo potter to bring his 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.
caption: A pot by Maria Martinez, approximately 1945, at the de Young Museum in San Francisco
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