Irene Tse Pe
San Ildefonso
Born into San Ildefonso Pueblo in 1961, Irene Tse-Pe was the daughter of Dora Tse-Pe and Tse-Pe. She grew up learning how to make pottery through watching and working with her parents. She also had significant exposure to her paternal grandmother Rose Gonzales and her maternal grandmother Candelaria Gachupin. She spoke often of her fond memories from growing up with them. And she learned a lot from them. Irene was only 15 in 1976 when she earned a First Place ribbon at Santa Fe Indian Market in the student category for a bowl she made. That same year she earned the Bummer Hurff Award for Best Student Pottery at Santa Fe. In 1980 she earned a Second Place ribbon for a piece, still as a student at Santa Fe. Then in 1986 as an adult she earned a Second Place ribbon in the Figures category at Santa Fe. In 1974, some of Irene's work was shown as part of the Seven Families in Pueblo Pottery exhibition at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. She was a participant in the Santa Fe Indian Market for more than 25 years, beginning in 1976.
100 West San Francisco Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501
(505) 986-1234 - www.andreafisherpottery.com - All Rights Reserved
San Ildefonso Pueblo
San Ildefonso Pueblo is located about twenty miles northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, west of Pojoaque, south of Santa Clara and straddling the Rio Grande. Although their ancestry has been traced to prehistoric pueblos in the Greater Mesa Verde area, the prehistoric pueblo at Tsankawi, in a non-contiguous parcel of Bandelier National Monument, is their most recent ancestral home. Tsankawi abuts the reservation on its northwest side.
Franciscan monks named the village after San Ildefonso and in 1617, forced the tribe to build a mission church on top of the village's main kiva. Before that the village was known as Powhoge, "where the water cuts through" (in Tewa). Today's pueblo was established as long ago as the 1300s. When the Spanish arrived in 1540, they estimated the village population at about 2,000.
That mission was destroyed during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and when Don Diego de Vargas returned to reclaim San Ildefonso in 1694, he found virtually all the Tewa people camped out on top of nearby Black Mesa. After an extended siege the two sides negotiated a treaty and the people returned to their villages. However, the next 250 years were not so good for them.
The swine flu pandemic of 1918 reduced the pueblo's population to about 90. Their population has grown to more than 600 since but the only economic activity available on the pueblo itself involves creating art in one form or another. The only other work is off-pueblo. San Ildefonso's population is small compared to neighboring Santa Clara Pueblo, but the pueblo maintains its own religious traditions and ceremonial feast days.
San Ildefonso is most known for being the home of the most famous Pueblo Indian potter, Maria Martinez. Many other excellent potters from this pueblo have produced quality pottery, too, among them: Blue Corn, Tonita and Juan Roybal, Dora Tse Pe and Rose Gonzales. Of course, the descendants of Maria Martinez are still important pillars of San Ildefonso's pottery tradition. Maria's influence reached far and wide, so far and wide that even Juan Quezada of the Mata Ortiz pottery renaissance in Chihuahua, Mexico, came to San Ildefonso to learn from her.
100 West San Francisco Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501
(505) 986-1234 - www.andreafisherpottery.com - All Rights Reserved