Garnet Pavatea was born in Hano at the foot of Hopi First Mesa in 1915. Her mother was Tewa, her father Hopi. Myrtle Young was her sister. They grew up surrounded by some of the finest Hopi-Tewa potters of the time, and both girls learned how to make pottery from their mother. Where most Pueblo women make pottery for the money they can earn, for Garnet it became a vehicle for self-expression in a timeless continuation of a cultural aesthetic. She also saw the making of pottery as a way to define herself vis-a-vis her own people and the outside world. Garnet began producing pieces for the marketplace around 1946. She made pottery almost constantly from then until she passed on in 1981.

Garnet married Womak Pavatea and they had a daughter, Wilma Rose Pavatea. Wilma learned how to make pottery from Garnet and produced miniature jars for about ten years, from around 1950 to around 1960.

Garnet entered her first juried competition in 1953, won a ribbon and was hooked. That began a lifelong association with the Museum of Northern Arizona and their annual Hopi Show. The quality of her work and her engaging personality led to her demonstrating her method of pottery making at the Museum of Northern Arizona for more than two decades. During her career she entered more than 400 pieces in juried competitions at the Museum of Northern Arizona's Hopi Artist Exhibition and earned at least 139 ribbons.

Garnet made pottery in all kinds of shapes and sizes, both redware and yellowware. It was in the 1960s that she began making plain redware bowls, often pressing the triangular point of a bottle opener into the wet clay to make bands of decorative corrugation, a style found mainly on ancient San Juan Redware and Kayenta pots. She often accompanied the bowls with matching ladles.

At the 1980 Hopi Show, she narrowly failed to win the Best of Pottery Division ribbon. That following winter she decided she was going to make big pots again, like those her mother had made but no one was making any more. She made this her goal, despite having lost both legs to diabetes. Somehow, she managed to gather and process her clay, then she made her biggest pot ever. She entered that pot in the Hopi Show and it "reclaimed" her Best of Pottery ribbon. She passed on two weeks later.

Some Exhibits that featured works by Garnet

• Elegance from Earth: Hopi Pottery. Heard Museum. Phoenix, AZ. March 24, 2012 to April 6, 2014
• Home: Native Peoples in the Southwest. Heard Museum. Phoenix, AZ. Opened in May 2005
• Every Picture Tells A Story. Heard Museum. Phoenix, AZ. September 20, 2002 to May 2005
• Following the Sun and Moon: Hopi Katsina Dolls. Heard Museum. Phoenix, AZ. January 12, 1995 to August 1, 1997