Effie Garcia


Santa Clara
Santa Clara Pueblo potter Effie Garcia
Carved red jar by Effie Garcia

Born in 1954, Effie Garcia has been making pottery since she was fifteen. She began by polishing pieces made by her mother, Victoria Gutierrez. Then she learned to coil, form and carve her own pots. Her carving style is a variation on her mother's deeply carved pottery outlined with matte slip; however, unlike her mother's rounded edges Effie's carving is crisp and sharp.

Effie has two sisters that follow in the family tradition, all doing variations on their mother's work (her brother makes dance figures and animals). All of them use Santa Clara clay, volcanic ash temper and red slip from Santo Domingo Pueblo. All their pots are fired outdoors with wood and they use manure (cow, sheep, or horse) to produce the smothered black finish.

In 1981 her husband, Orville Garcia (of Acoma Pueblo), started making pottery on his own. The following year they began working together. Orville makes the hand coiled pots, Effie draws the design which she first works out on paper, and both work on the carving before the clay dries. Orville sands, Effie polishes, Orville recuts the carved designs, Effie outlines the incisions with slip and Orville finishes the work by painting in the carved area. The pot is then completed by ground-firing.

Their favorite style features a classically shaped bowl with a narrow base and a wide shoulder. Designs range from the traditional feather pattern, avanyu (water serpent), bear-with-heart-line and kiva step to modern elegant flourishes, swirls and Art Deco-influenced geometrics. Technically, their pottery is a beautiful cpmbination of form, balance and precision design. The work has an immediate appeal to both ethnic-art collectors and collectors of mainstream American art.

Effie and Orville have been consistent award winners at the SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market, the Gallup Inter-Tribal Ceremonial Show and the Eight Northern Pueblos Arts and Crafts Show since 1983. Effie says making pottery is healing for her and she loves to see the happy faces of the people who purchase their work. Their work is signed: "Effie Orville Garcia SCP."

Effie and Orville have also been passing their knowledge and techniques on to their grandchildren Derrick and Brooklyn. We've seen some excellent pottery from them, too.


100 West San Francisco Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501
(505) 986-1234 - www.andreafisherpottery.com - All Rights Reserved

 

Santa Clara Pueblo

The Puye Cliff Ruins
Ruins at Puye Cliffs, Santa Clara Pueblo

Santa Clara Pueblo straddles the Rio Grande about 25 miles north of Santa Fe. Of all the pueblos, Santa Clara has the largest number of potters.

The ancestral roots of the Santa Clara people have been traced to the pueblos in the Mesa Verde region in southwestern Colorado. When that area began to get dry between about 1100 and 1300, some of the people migrated to the Chama River Valley and constructed Poshuouinge (about 3 miles south of what is now Abiquiu on the edge of the mesa above the Chama River). Eventually reaching two and three stories high with up to 700 rooms on the ground floor, Poshuouinge was inhabited from about 1375 to about 1475. Drought then again forced the people to move, some of them going to the area of Puye (on the eastern slopes of the Pajarito Plateau of the Jemez Mountains) and others to Ohkay Owingeh (San Juan Pueblo, along the Rio Grande). Beginning around 1580, drought forced the residents of the Puye area to relocate closer to the Rio Grande and they founded what we now know as Santa Clara Pueblo on the west bank of the river, between San Juan and San Ildefonso Pueblos.

In 1598 Spanish colonists from nearby Yunque (the seat of Spanish government near San Juan Pueblo) brought the first missionaries to Santa Clara. That led to the first mission church being built around 1622. However, the Santa Clarans chafed under the weight of Spanish rule like the other pueblos did and were in the forefront of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. One pueblo resident, a mixed black and Tewa man named Domingo Naranjo, was one of the rebellion's ringleaders. When Don Diego de Vargas came back to the area in 1694, he found most of the Santa Clarans on top of nearby Black Mesa (with the people of San Ildefonso). An extended siege didn't subdue them so eventually, the two sides negotiated a treaty and the people returned to their pueblo. However, successive invasions and occupations by northern Europeans took their toll on the tribe over the next 250 years. The Spanish flu pandemic in 1918 almost wiped them out.

Today, Santa Clara Pueblo is home to as many as 2,600 people and they comprise probably the largest per capita number of artists of any North American tribe (estimates of the number of potters run as high as 1-in-4 residents).

Today's pottery from Santa Clara is typically either black or red. It is usually highly polished and designs might be deeply carved or etched ("sgraffito") into the pot's surface. The water serpent, ("avanyu"), is a traditional design motif of Santa Clara pottery. Another motif comes from the legend that a bear helped the people find water during a drought. The bear paw has appeared on their pottery ever since.

One of the reasons for the distinction this pueblo has received is because of the evolving artistry the potters have brought to the craft. Not only did this pueblo produce excellent black and redware, several notable innovations helped move pottery from the realm of utilitarian vessels into the domain of art. Different styles of polychrome redware emerged in the 1920's-1930's. In the early 1960's experiments with stone inlay, incising and double firing began. Modern potters have also extended the tradition with unusual shapes, slips and designs, illustrating what one Santa Clara potter said: "At Santa Clara, being non-traditional is the tradition." (This refers strictly to artistic expression; the method of creating pottery remains traditional).

Santa Clara Pueblo is home to a number of famous pottery families: Tafoya, Baca, Gutierrez, Naranjo, Suazo, Chavarria, Garcia, Vigil, Tapia - to name a few.

Harvest, Santa Clara Pueblo c. 1912 Courtesy Museum of New Mexico Neg. No. 4128

Santa Clara Pueblo c. 1920 Courtesy Museum of New Mexico Neg. No. 4214
Map showing the location of Santa Clara Pueblo
For more info:
at Wikipedia
Pueblos of the Rio Grande, Daniel Gibson, ISBN-13:978-1-887896-26-9, Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2001
Upper photo courtesy of Einar Kvaran, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License


100 West San Francisco Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501
(505) 986-1234 - www.andreafisherpottery.com - All Rights Reserved

Rosita Velarde Family Tree

Disclaimer: This "family tree" is a best effort on our part to determine who the potters are in this family and arrange them in a generational order. The general information available is questionable so we have tried to show each of these diagrams to living members of each family to get their input and approval, too. This diagram is subject to change should we get better info.

    Rosita Velarde
    • Teresa & Tony Gutierrez Sr.
      • Earl Gutierez
      • Ivan Gutierrez
      • Tony Gutierrez, Jr.
      • Marie Suazo
      • Doris Tenorio
      • Carol Velarde
    • (Faustina Gutierrez (1898-1976), mother of Celestino Gutierrez)
    • Victoria & Celestino Gutierrez
      • Effie Garcia & Orville Garcia (Acoma)
        • Adrian Garcia & Madeline Naranjo
        • Brooklyn Garcia (granddaughter)
        • Derrick Garcia (grandson)
      • Eugene Gutierrez
      • Julie Gutierrez & John Gutierrez
      • Sally Tafoya
      • Gail Tapia
      • Ethel Yazza (married into Picuris)
    • Alfred Velarde

Some of the above info is drawn from Pueblo Indian Pottery, 750 Artist Biographies, by Gregory Schaaf, © 2000, Center for Indigenous Arts & Studies

Other info is derived from personal contacts with family members and through interminable searches of the Internet.

100 West San Francisco Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501
(505) 986-1234 - www.andreafisherpottery.com - All Rights Reserved