Innovation and Legacy

While Nampeyo was influenced by the shapes and design patterns from several types of ancestral Puebloan pottery, the one she became most known for was the Sikyatki polychrome style. Drawing inspiration from certain design patterns, she incorporated her own artistic expression to make them her own. Two of the most recognizable patterns that appear in her and her descendants’ work are the “eagle” or “bird tail” and the “migration” or “bat wing” designs. 

By the early 1900s, Nampeyo’s eyesight began to diminish, and she began to work with her daughters, in particular Fannie Nampeyo (Hopi), who became well-known in her own right and continued the family’s legacy by teaching her children. Each generation has continued to use some of the recognizable family design characteristics while making their own design innovations. 

Maria Poveka Montoya Martinez (San Ildefonso) was born in 1887 at San Ildefonso Pueblo in what is now New Mexico. Like many Pueblo potters, Martinez began making pottery when she was young, learning primarily from family members, including her aunt, Nicolasa Montoya. She spent most of her life at San Ildefonso and became one of the most well-known Native American potters, traveling to World’s Fairs and selling her work at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe. While she and her husband, Julian, began their careers with black-on-white, or polychrome, they became famous for blackware, or black-on-black pottery.

Like Nampeyo, the Martinezes were influenced by pottery found at Ancestral Puebloan sites in present-day New Mexico. They worked together to revitalize and refine blackware pottery. The shiny surface of the pottery is created by polishing or burnishing the surface of the clay to a high shine using a smooth stone or dried gourd. To create the deep black color, potters use reduction firing, a process in which the iron rich clay is smothered with dung and ash to create an anoxic environment that tuns the clay from red-orange to deep black. The contrast between the shiny and matte surfaces is created by burnishing the clay first and then painting on the designs with slip—a liquid form of clay.