Menchego, Diane

Born in 1964, Diane Menchego is a potter from Santa Ana Pueblo. She’s one of the few potters at Santa Ana still trying to keep the pueblo’s pottery making tradition alive. Diane was a student of Elvira Montoya, who had been a student of Eudora Montoya. Elvira and Eudora appear to have been among the only folks working to keep the Santa Ana pottery tradition alive since the 1970s.

For a couple hundred years the people of Santa Ana traded agricultural products with the people of Zia Pueblo and the people of Jemez Pueblo in return for pottery. By the time the women of Santa Ana decided to try to revive their own pueblo’s tradition, their design palette had been deluged with designs imported from those two pueblos over the last couple centuries.

Diane usually signs her pottery “D. Menchego Tamaya”. Sometimes she adds “Santa Ana Pueblo” written or etched somewhere nearby on the base of her pieces.