Santo Domingo Pueblo Pottery

The pottery traditions of Santo Domingo almost died out after the railroads arrived and many Santo Domingos went to work laying tracks. Even today many Santo Domingo men work as wildland firefighters for the US Forest Service in fire season and ply their artistic talents during the rest of the year.

Some of today’s potters remember their grandmothers and aunts walking out to the highway to sell their wares along the side of the road in the 1950s and 1960s. Those were hard times.

Potter Robert Tenorio began working to revive the Santo Domingo pottery tradition in the early 1970s. His influence can be found among many of today’s Santo Domingo potters, even if they say he stimulated them to learn on their own.

While today’s Santo Domingo pottery is known for designs often described as simple geometrics, an outstanding feature of those designs is their boldness: the lines are thick and well-defined.

Religious leaders forbid the representation of human figures as well as other sacred designs on pottery made for commercial purposes. Birds, fish and flowers are common Santo Domingo design motifs. Depictions of mammals are rarely seen. Another typical Santo Domingo style is to paint in the negative, meaning cover the pot in panels of big swatches of black and red so that only a few lines of the cream slip show through.