Interconnected
A COMPREHENSIVE LOOK INTO HOW NAMPEYO’S SIKYATKI REVIVAL INSPIRED THE CAREERS OF MARIA AND JULIAN MARTINEZ.
A comprehensive look into how Nampeyo’s Sikyatki Revival inspired the careers of Maria and Julian Martinez.
Most contemporary Indian art collectors and curators are aware of the successful Pueblo pottery careers of Nampeyo, who created the Sikyatki Revival Art Movement at Hopi in the mid-1880s, and the later career of Maria Martinez and her husband Julian at San Ildefonso Pueblo. Yet most collectors view Nampeyo’s and the Martinezes’ careers as unrelated. After all, Nampeyo lived at remote Hopi in Arizona and Maria lived much later in New Mexico at San Ildefonso Pueblo, near Santa Fe.
Yet despite the time and space between the artists, they share two important connections, one historic and the other aesthetic. In this new light, their careers reflect each other’s in important ways for understanding the development of Pueblo art pottery.
As a collector and dealer of Pueblo pottery, I enjoy discovering new connections between the ceramics and the art potters. So, I was surprised to see one of Nampeyo’s distinctive seed jar forms appear in a historic San Ildefonso polychrome, as the seed jar was not a traditional form at San Ildefonso.
Nampeyo revived the seed jar form from ancient Hopi ceramics, and she developed several varied seed jar forms in her decades of potting. The seed jar is considered one of her major achievements as an art potter. The object in Figure 1 is an example of one of Nampeyo’s seed jars from around 1900 to 1910.
The similar seed jar form from San Ildefonso from around 1910 to 1920 can be seen in Figure 2.
The two forms are clearly similar. We know from the written record that the Martinezes were shown Nampeyo’s work by local museum officials as well as nearby traders. I’ve seen two other seed jars from San Ildefonso in my three decades of study. Although unsigned, this ceramic has many characteristics of the polychrome ceramics of the Martinezes, including Maria’s precise molding and Julian’s control in his drawing.
Then, I noticed a connection between Nampeyo’s swirling Sikyatki Revival designs and Julian’s similarly abstract curvilinear designs. For example, here’s a low yellowware bowl by Nampeyo, circa 1900 to 1910, with a design I call the rain sash design, as it resembles the round corn husk balls woven into a dance sash that dangle from a man’s waist as he dances. Seen here is Nampeyo’s version, with two corn husk balls at the end of her red swirls, seen in Figure 3.
In Figure 4, you can see Julian’s masterful reuse of the same design. Note how the four curved red feathers also swirl in a particularly Hopi way in the design.
Julian kept a notebook for sketching pottery design ideas. His interest in fine line curving and swooping feathers is often seen on the later blackware pieces that he painted for Maria. Significantly, Maria began creating wide open bowls with flat bottoms to better present Julian’s extraordinary designs. This new flat bowl varies from the traditional round-bottomed chili bowl used at San Ildefonso, but closely resembles the open, flat bottomed bowls Nampeyo created to showcase her beautiful designs.
These two aesthetic elements of the ceramics, form and design, seemed to echo Nampeyo’s artistic pottery career. I decided to research further by reading the two best-known Pueblo pottery scholars of the 1920s, Ruth Bunzel and Carl E. Guthe, to see if they could advance my insight into Nampeyo’s influence on the San Ildefonso potters. I was not disappointed.
Bunzel’s classic study The Pueblo Potter (Columbia University Press, 1929) provides two significant facts that strongly support my argument that Nampeyo’s work influenced Julian Martinez: She writes in the 1920s, “Hopi Pottery is everywhere greatly admired, and Hopi designs are in common use at San Ildefonso, where their introduction is credited to Julian Martinez, the husband of the famous Maria.”
Bunzel writes further of Julian: “…who decorated all of Maria’s pottery. He is a skillful painter, and a