Ortiz, Norma Jean

Norma Jean Ortiz (Juanico) was born into Acoma Pueblo in 1955. As a potter, she seems to have mostly made polychrome jars, bowls, turkeys, storytellers and turtles, but she also made clay Christmas ornaments and small figures and she liked to paint intricate designs on wooden boards. Her mother was of the Acoma Big Turkey clan, her father was Anglo, of the Small Eagle clan (the clan differentiation is very important: someone would never marry a member of the same “Big” clan as themselves as that would weaken their blood lines).

There’s little other information about Norma Jean available but it seems she was born a Juanico and married an Ortiz. Her mother was an Acoma woman, her father an Anglo and she grew up in the pueblo being ribbed by the kids around her for not being “Indian enough.” She learned the traditional way to make pottery through watching her grandmother and great-grandmother as they made pottery. She was selling her pottery in the marketplace shortly after she finished school (in the early 1970s). Norma Jean had a daughter and she supported herself and her daughter for most of their lives with her pottery sales alone.

Norma Jean made mostly Anasazi-Revival pottery, including corrugated. She used pieces of deer antler to smooth her coils and to make the corrugation. She always did her painting using a traditional yucca brush (a yucca leaf chewed so that hairs are left for bristles). Where many potters have sketch books and notebooks of drawings they’ve made from ancient potsherds they’ve found, Norma Jean created straight from her head. Nothing was written down, no pencil drawings made, no planning sketches, etc. Like the ancients, she just painted straight from her imagination. She signed most of her pottery “Norma Jean Acoma, NM” but some she signed “Norma Jean Ortiz, Acoma NM.”