Maria and Julian Martinez’s more properly. The couple were from the San Ildefonso Pueblo, part of the larger Tewa Peoples, and were active in the 20th century. Maria came from a long line of potters. Her craft was making clay pots, while her husband would paint the images on them. Together, they made traditional red-bodied clay pieces decorated with white, red, and black slip, a watered-down, brushable form of clay.
As the story goes, in the early 1900s, archeologist Edgar Lee Hewitt found an unusual black-on-white pottery sherd at a nearby site and was searching for someone who could recreate it. His intention was to help preserve this ancient technique, but what Maria and her husband Julian developed would instead change the course of indigenous ceramics.
But first, Maria had to figure out how to turn red clay into black without the use of glazes. Looking to the neighboring Santa Clara Pueblo, Maria learned how to trap the smoke created in the firing process so that its inky darkness infused the baking clay. Although Hewitt seemed pleased with the pottery she produced for him, Maria was not satisfied. She hid the remaining pieces for years until Hewitt returned with visitors.
Their interest inspired her to continue refining the blackware, and Maria and Julian eventually developed a process in which she would coat her unbaked clayware with a rust-red slip, a watered-down, brushable form of clay. Once it dried, she would polish the surface with stone until it shone. In the firing process, the slip would become a gleaming, deep black. To achieve the two-toned blacks, Julian would paint traditional designs on the burnished surface with another layer of slip before firing the piece. When pulled out of the smoldering ashes, the pot (or in this case, plate) would shine where Maria had polished it while Julian’s images were left matte black.
The work they created was deeply rooted in the long history of their culture, yet their ceramics also spoke to the art deco and modernist times they inhabited. Collectors were drawn to them, and with increased train travel connecting both coasts in the 1930s and ‘40s, Maria and Julian’s pieces began to get noticed outside of Native American contexts, notably by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt who invited the couple to the White House in 1934.
Maria thought her first pieces were embarrassing failures, and very likely, they would have remained hidden had curiosity not led Hewitt and his guests back to her door. Through a little encouragement, Maria, along with her husband, ended up not only reviving a tradition but also transforming it.
With that newfound success, Maria and Julian shared their knowledge with their family and community so that they too could reap the benefits. When asked, Maria simply said, “I just thank God, because [my work is] not only for me; it’s for all the people. I said to my God, the Great Spirit, Mother Earth gave me this luck. So I’m not going to keep it.”