Chavarria, Stella

“I draw it out in pencil first. Everybody says that it looks easy for me to carve, but I guess after doing it for so many years, you don’t really think about it. You just do it.”

Stella Chavarria was born into Santa Clara Pueblo in 1939. Her mother was Teresita Naranjo, her grandmother was Margaret Tafoya’s sister, Christina Naranjo. With a pedigree like that you know Stella makes exquisite Santa Clara-style pottery. Stella has also passed her learning on to her daughter, Denise Chavarria.

Stella’s pottery is created in the traditional hand-coiled method featuring sharply incised carving and exquisite polishing. She began making pottery in 1955. She concentrates on decorations depicting the avanyu (water serpent protector of Pueblo people), feathers and swirls.

Deeper carving is characteristic of Santa Clara style, whether it’s red ware or smothered black ware. The carver cuts away the background, leaving the design standing in relief. The design and body are polished and the background is matte-painted. But the piece needs to be made just the right thickness and it must be dry and hard first.

When the piece is leather hard, then the carver can go to work. Stella uses woodcarving tools, screwdrivers and a kitchen paring knife sharpened so many times that its blade sticks out only an inch from the hilt. She says, “I draw it out in pencil first. Everybody says that it looks easy for me to carve, but I guess after doing it for so many years, you don’t really think about it. You just do it.”

Stella’s work is in many of the major books published on pueblo pottery: Fourteen Families in Pueblo Pottery by Dillingham and Lillian Peaster’s Pueblo Pottery Families, just to name a couple.

She has been in dozens of exhibitions going back to the seventies and is featured in many major collections including the Heard Museum. Additionally, she has earned numerous awards for her work at the Santa Fe Indian Market.

She signs her work: “Stella Chavarria, Santa Clara”.