Judy Tafoya

Santa Clara

A plain, polished red jar

"It gives me joy, peace and contentment... to create a piece of pottery that can minister to someone else by beauty and testimony." - Judy Tafoya

The daughter of Cecilia Naranjo and James Lee McLean, Judy Tafoya was born in Los Angeles, CA in January 1962. There's no record of when the family returned to Santa Clara but Judy did say she learned how to make pottery through watching and working with her mother and her grandmother, Christina Naranjo. She was also encouraged by her older sister, Sharon Naranjo Garcia. After Judy married Lincoln Tafoya, Sharon taught him, too. (Lincoln was from a different clan and a different Tafoya family: marriage strictures in the pueblos ensure that potential spouses are genetically further apart than first cousins.)

Judy and Lincoln collaborated on their pottery almost all their married life. They made carved redware and blackware, jars, bowls, seed pots, plates, lidded jars, water jars, storage jars, vases, wedding vases, nativity sets and some figures.

Judy participated in events like the Santa Fe Indian Market, Eight Northern Pueblos Arts and Crafts Show, the Gallup InterTribal Ceremonial, the Heard Museum Guild Indian Arts Fair and Market, the New Mexico State Fair, the Eiteljorg Museum Indian Art Market and others. She and Lincoln earned multiple ribbons at each.

Judy and Lincoln shared the labor in making their pottery. He gathered and prepared the clay, she formed the pots. Usually she made four to six pots in sequence. Once dry, she did the deep carving, then Lincoln did the low-relief carving/sgraffito work. After that, Judy polished using a stone passed down from her grandmother, Christina Naranjo. They did the firing together.

Lincoln and Judy had seven children, all of whom learned how to make pottery.

Some Awards Earned by Judy

  • 2011 Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market, Classification II - Pottery, Division C - Traditional, native clay, hand built, carved: First Place
  • 2011 Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market: Judge's Choice Award
  • 2008 Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market: Judge's Choice Award
  • 2006 Eight Northern Indian Pueblos Arts & Crafts Show: Best in Traditional Pottery. Awarded for a collaborative pot, black, deep-carved storage jar, entitled "Avanyu," made with Lincoln Tafoya

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