Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

This polished black jar was created in the black-on-black style for which Maria Martinez is so well known. Perhaps the best-known Tewa ceramist, Maria Martinez like many of her contemporaries from San Ildefonso Pueblo, worked with others on her ceramics, most famously her husband Julian, who decorated the pots she had formed and polished, until his death in 1943.

Edgar Hewett requested that Maria and Julian attempt to recreate Ancestral Puebloan ceramics based upon fragments that he had discovered. It was with this inspiration that Maria and Julian created the now world-renowned black-on-black pottery style.  Julian had also worked as a janitor at the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe where he studied the forms and motifs present in the museum’s collection of Ancestral Puebloan pottery.