Martinez, Julian
Julian Martinez was a young painter from San Ildefonso Pueblo. He grew up in the pueblo, learning his people’s ways, their history, their songs, their dances. In 1904 he married an excellent young potter who was also from San Ildefonso. They enjoyed their marriage ceremony and were almost immediately after loading themselves onto a train to St. Louis. They spent their honeymoon in St. Louis where his new wife, Maria, was demonstrating pottery making at the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition at the St. Louis World’s Fair.
Throughout Julian and Maria’s lives together, she made pottery and he painted it. Before they were married Maria would sometimes go to someone else and ask (for instance, Tonita Roybal’s husband, Juan Roybal, painted a few pieces for her) but once married, Julian painted everything she made. And he was a master painter.
One day in 1908, Edgar Hewett came to the pueblo. He had been excavating some of the ancient ruins found in the Tsankawi area, a small tableland area on the eastern edge of the Pajarito Plateau up the canyon slopes from San Ildefonso on the west side of the Rio Grande. (Tsankawi is now a non-adjacent and undeveloped piece of Bandelier National Monument). The San Ildefonso people trace their history back to those ruins so when Hewett found something he thought was out of the ordinary, he went to today’s pueblo and talked to them. What he’d found was black potsherds and he hadn’t been aware they had made black pottery in the past.
In the ancient days some Tewa pueblos were able to make black pottery using bundles of grass and pine needles as a smothering agent (to create the oxygen-reduction atmosphere) but nowhere north of Oaxaca has there been found a deposit of black clay. And in 1908, black pottery had long been gone from the San Ildefonso color palette: the potters were mostly making colonial-influenced “traditional” shapes and decorating them with multi-colored, colonial-influenced geometric designs, using mineral and vegetal paints.
The story is that Hewett wandered around the village with some black potsherds in his hands, asking the women if they knew of anyone who could still make pots like those must have been. Everyone pointed to Maria saying, “She’s the best potter in town. Ask her.” He did, and when she said “Yes, I can do that,” he commissioned several from her and paid her in full, up front. What followed from that beginning is the story of legends.
When Hewett returned to San Ildefonso a couple years later (he’d had to make a trip to Yale to deliver artifacts he’d removed from the ancient ruins and get his funding renewed), Maria had some black pots to show him. She wasn’t so happy with the pottery but he and his students were overjoyed. They bought everything she had (including some she’d hidden under her bed) and paid her to make more.
With some freedom from the day-to-day financial constraints, Julian started experimenting with his paint, looking for something that would display more appropriately on Maria’s polished black surfaces (he felt his original formulations didn’t contrast well enough). It took him a while but he settled on a formulation using juice boiled-down from Rocky Mountain beeweed. When applied thick enough, it came out a good, contrasting matte black after firing. It also adhered to the polished surface better, giving the design a longer lifetime.
At first he was painting his designs in matte black, then he tried painting them in the negative: filling in the background but leaving the main design in polished black. The combination of Maria’s pots and his matte black designs shortly made her the most famous Indigenous potter on Earth.
Maria never signed a pot until about 1922. Then she finally heard the truth in the argument about the monetary value of her name on her pieces at the time of their sale. However, Kenneth Chapman, Director of the Museum of New Mexico at the time, convinced her she needed to Anglicize her name to get more money in the primarily Anglo marketplace. So from 1922 to 1926 she signed everything she made with “Marie”. Sometime in 1926 she added “Julian” to the bottom of her pots, just after “Marie”.
That went against tradition even more than Maria signing her pots in the first place: the making of pottery was not a man’s job. However, a man could easily be a respected painter and Maria was recognizing him for that: he painted all her pottery until he died in 1943.
During those same years Maria and Julian did still make some polychrome pottery. The relative rarity of those pieces, though, in the flood of black-on-black, made each of them even more valuable in the eyes of the buying public.