Maria Montoya Martinez, Po’ve’ka (Water Lily)

Maria Montoya Martinez, Po’ve’ka (Water Lily), was a Pueblo artist whose pottery reframed Native ceramics as a fine art. Her work reinvented and revived the Pueblo ceramic tradition. Her pottery is in the collections of several museums, including the Smithsonian, the Metro­politan Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, and the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, among others.

Born to the Tewa tribe at the San Ildefonso Pueblo in New Mexico, she learned pottery-making from her aunt, grandmother, and a cousin at a time when traditional pottery-making techniques were in decline. She revived an ancient local process for making all-black pottery, which was then decorated by her husband, Julian Martinez. Martinez’s creative process and artistic development were directly influenced by the shapes, patterns, and colors found in historic pottery of the San Ildefonso Pueblo established circa 1300. In 1908, Edgar Hewett, director of the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe, had discovered prehistoric black pottery shards during an excavation of an old Pueblo site. He chose Martinez to recreate the prehistoric artifacts for exhibition in the museum. In 1978, Martinez had a major solo exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery. In 2024, the Heard Museum in Phoenix is presenting an original exhibition and catalogue entitled Maria & Modernism that seeks to integrate her work into the Modernist tradition in American art history.