Lucario, Rebecca

“My grandmother let me play with the mud they used to plaster their adobe house,” Rebecca recalls. “We made little animal figures and pinch pots with red clay. I still have two pots that I made at the age of eight. One is a flower plate, the other a vase with lines. She never let us play with her clay because clay is very sacred.”

Born at Acoma Pueblo in 1951, Rebecca Lucario is a member of the Yellow Corn Clan. She has been actively making pottery since 1965. She’s recognized as the finest Acoma potter working today with her exquisite fine line eye dazzlers and Mimbres Revival designs. Her pottery is thin and elegant, her designs perfectly executed.

Rebecca learned this art growing up with her grandmother, Delores Sanchez (1902-1991). Then she had a hand in teaching her sisters: Diane Lewis, Judy Lewis, Marilyn Ray and Carolyn Concho, and she’s passing the tradition on to her children Amanda and Daniel.

In Rebecca’s process she fires her pieces twice, first in an electric kiln to test the clay, then outside in the traditional manner which she says gets much hotter than the kiln firing. Her designs are so fine she may spend up to 12 hours spread over several days just on the black design work for one of her pots.

Rebecca says she doesn’t measure or plot her designs with tools, she spaces the basic design elements purely by eye. She uses a yucca brush to paint her designs and signs her creations: Acoma, NM R. Lucario.