Maria Martinez was born in 1887 to Reyes Pena and Tomas Montoya. Her father eked out a living for the family of six working variously as a farmer, a carpenter, and a cowboy. There is no record of Martinez's birth and her biographers have chosen dates ranging from 1881 to 1887. She lived her entire life in the pueblo of San Ildefonso, N. Mex. , a small group of adobe houses clinging to the eastern bank of the Rio Grande about twenty miles northwest of Santa Fe. As a child, Martinez, whose name in the Pueblo language Tewa was Po-Ve-Ka, liked nothing more than to watch her aunt, the accomplished potter Nicolasa Pena, at work. Using ancient techniques, Pena, would 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. As they had been for centuries, these perfectly round, polychrome pots, created without the benefit of a potter's wheel or kiln, would be used in the households of the pueblo. Martinez absorbed this tradition from her aunt and at the age of seven or eight began to mold crude plates and bowls.
Education
Martinez attended the government grammar school in her pueblo until 1896, when the tribal council chose her and her sister Desideria as two of the children to be sent to St. Catherine's Indian School in Santa Fe.
Career
In 1898 Martinez returned to San Ildefonso. Unsure of her next step, she spent some time doing odd jobs for the teacher in the government school. In 1907, Julian Martinez was hired by Edgar L. Hewett, director of the School of American Research, to excavate prehistoric pueblo sites. Hewett, who had heard that Martinez was an accomplished potter, asked her to clarify some technical issues by reproducing pots based on shards found on the Pajarito Plateau. Though some reports claim that these shards had an unusual black finish, the artifacts were not black and Martinez reproduced them using the methods still common in San Ildefonso, though she did so with distinguished artistry. Hewett eagerly purchased all these pots and assured her that he would find a market outside the pueblo for any more she would produce. Sometime during this period, Julian Martinez, who painted the patterns on the pots that his wife molded, began to experiment with the firing process. By smothering the fire with horse manure, he generated smoke that carbonized the pots, leaving a rich black finish. Though many credited him with discovering this process, he actually built upon a living tradition practiced in the pueblos around San Ildefonso. However, he did succeed in refining the technique to create a uniquely lustrous black surface which resembled metal more than clay. The Martinezes' real innovation came around 1918, when Julian drew a pattern on unpolished clay that Maria then rubbed smooth with a round stone; after firing, this produced a glossy black design on a matte black background. Because polishing a fine pattern was difficult and time-consuming, Julian began instead to paint his patterns with a watery clay slip onto an evenly smoothed surface. This method produced the stunningly beautiful contrast of matte black patterning on a mirror-like ground for which the Martinezes became known. In the 1920's, she signed "Marie, " a change in spelling that Chester Faris, the director of the Indian School in Santa Fe, thought would appeal to Anglos; in the 1950's, she began signing "Maria. " With the exception of a few experimental pieces, she never decorated her own pots. After her husband's death in 1943, her daughter-in-law Santana worked with her until 1956 and then her son Popovi Da, a collaboration that lasted until her virtual retirement in 1971. In 1974 the Martinez family began holding summer workshops at the Idyllwild campus of the University of Southern California, which spread the craft of pueblo pottery to non-Indian artists. When Martinez 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.
Achievements
Maria Martinez known primarily for developing matte black-on-black ware, who was the key figure in the 20th-century revival of Pueblo pottery. The first recorded purchase of a piece of decorated black-on-black ware was by the Museum of New Mexico in 1920. Over the next few decades, as increasing interest in Indian cultures generated an Anglo market for pueblo pottery and newly constructed government highways brought communities like San Ildefonso within easy reach of tourists, Martinez's flawless and unusual pots became highly sought after. 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 in 1980. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C. , and the Wheelwright Museum in Santa Fe both mounted retrospectives of her work. She received countless awards and honorary degrees, was chosen to lay the cornerstone of Rockefeller Center, and was invited to the White House by four presidents: Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Johnson. Yet even as her fame spread throughout the world, Martinez passionately clung to the traditional pueblo conception of pottery making as a communal endeavor. Indeed, her greatest impact was as a teacher. As early as 1920, she became self-conscious about the financial rewards her pottery brought and asked her husband if she could teach others to make black ware.
Personality
In the afternoon of her wedding, Martinez and her husband were on a train headed for the World's Fair in St. Louis, Mo. , where they spent four and one-half months with a group of pueblo Indians demonstrating traditional dancing and pottery making. This was Martinez's first public recognition as a potter. She always encouraged the sale of other women's pots, often hiding her own on a back shelf. Placing no particular value on her signature and not wanting to disappoint tourists, she would gladly take up a ballpoint pen or pencil and sign any pot that might possibly have been made by her. Martinez became painfully aware of the dilution of Indian traditions resulting from these changes and, during the last years of her life, she urged the young of San Ildefonso to maintain the culture she had done so much to revive.
Connections
In 1904 she married Julian Martinez, also from San Ildefonso, in a traditional early morning service at the pueblo. The couple gave birth to four sons and a daughter who died at birth.
