Jennifer Tafoya | Connecting Past and Present

Santa Clara Pueblo potter Jennifer Tafoya creates contemporary animal-themed artwork using traditional techniques.

By Gussie Fauntleroy

Every year at Santa Fe Indian Market, a longtime collector of Jennifer Tafoya’s pottery reminds the artist about one of the first of her pieces they purchased. Tafoya was about 13 years old and sharing a booth with her parents, acclaimed Santa Clara Pueblo potters Ray and Emily Suazo Tafoya. At the time, Tafoya was forming small animal figures from balls of clay, then polishing, firing and painting them. The piece that drew her collector’s eye was a little brontosaurus.

Fast forward about 30 years to the 2023 Santa Fe Indian Market, when another dinosaur-themed piece by Tafoya caught people’s attention. This time it was a finely shaped, 4½-inch-tall blackware pot featuring dinosaurs in an intricate forest scene. The design, which flows around the pot, was delicately painted after being etched into the clay. Titled CAUGHT BY SURPRISE, the piece earned Best of Show.

It is one of many top awards Tafoya has received over the years at the Santa Fe Indian Market, the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market and other major shows. Her etched and painted pottery was also chosen to be part of a national traveling exhibition and is in the permanent collections of the Heard and the Denver Art Museum as well as in numerous private collections. She will be at Santa Fe Indian Market again this year, August 17 and 18. While her work has evolved from small solid forms to elegantly shaped hollow vessels and she continues to hone her mastery of traditional Pueblo pottery methods, one thing has not changed: The images she chooses are of living creatures like fish and other marine life and animals of the land.

Pottery has been part of Tafoya’s world all her life. Growing up on Santa Clara Pueblo, north of Santa Fe, New Mexico, she was always around ceramic artists. Her parents and other relatives created pots using labor-intensive methods that have been employed by Pueblo potters for countless generations. As a child Tafoya and her sister watched and helped with much of it. They went with their parents to certain areas on the Pueblo to find and dig clay, looking for the right colors to produce the slip for traditional Santa Clara blackware or redware.

Then came many hours of sifting and mixing the clay, adding water and kneading it in preparation for hand-rolling coils that are stacked and shaped into a vessel. Tafoya remembers sitting with her sister on the porch and sifting volcanic ash to serve as a temper—when mixed with clay it reduces the chance of the pot exploding in the firing.

As a child Tafoya loved the family’s dogs and cats and especially her pet fish. Beginning at age 6, she would sit with her parents as they made pots while she molded clay into animal shapes. “It was like playing in mud,” she says. Soon her father taught her to etch designs into the clay using a method of surface carving called sgraffito, used in the late 1960s and early ’70s by artists such as Tony Da of San Ildefonso Pueblo and Joseph Lonewolf and Grace Medicine Flower of Santa Clara Pueblo.

Once Tafoya’s vessels are shaped, she scrapes the surface smooth and then spends hours hand-polishing it to a fine burnish using a polishing stone. She fires the pots in an open wood fire before etching and painting the designs. If the ground is dry and it’s not too windy, she builds and tends the fire in her yard, placing her pots into a tin box and building the fire around it. She checks through holes in the box to see if the pots are glowing, and when they are, she smothers the firing with horse manure if the pots are to become blackware. Wood firing is the most precarious stage, since it’s not unusual for pots to crack or explode.

For Tafoya, the most enjoyable part of the process is etching and painting the designs. She draws directly onto the pot with a wax pencil, beginning with a rough design that can be rubbed off. Once she’s satisfied with the design, she etches over it in fine lines, working slowly with a highly controlled hand. “The first etching is very important, no mistake making,” she says. “Then I start doing detail, detail, detail: feathers, scales, fur.”

For years the artist used an X-Acto knife for the sgraffito. Then about 10 years ago while at a hobby store she noticed a hand-held tool for embossing metal. She bought some rivets, sharpened them with a whetstone and attached them to the embosser. It created the perfect tool for producing extremely fine etching in clay. “I call it my pencil. I can sharpen it needle sharp, change out the rivets and resharpen it,” she says.

The final stage in Tafoya’s art is painting. She makes her own paints by digging and grinding minerals. She knows where to find minerals to produce the colors she wants: kaolin for white; ochre for red or yellow; azurite for deep blue; copper for greens; and manganese for purple, among others. Whenever she’s out fishing, hunting or hiking, her eyes scan the ground. If a stone is soft enough, she’ll scrape it on the spot to see if its powder might work.

While Tafoya’s pots feature animals of all kinds, recently she has become fascinated with sea slugs. Numerous species of the marine invertebrates exist in an enormous variety of sizes, colors and shapes. One pot features green sea sheep, a kind of sea slug that appears to have a sheep’s face and horns. The artist has also etched and painted a species known as a blue sea dragon, with blue, feathery tenacles. “They’re so colorful and I like the movement, all the little tenacles, the waves, the colors and shapes,” she says. All of Tafoya’s pots also include traditional Santa Clara abstract designs. Painted behind the blue sea dragons are lightning bolts. Tafoya chose the design because among other meanings it can suggest danger, and the tiny creatures, measuring at the size of a quarter, are extremely poisonous.

Other animals that have adorned her pots over the years include birds, fish, rabbits, butterflies, turtles and even dragons. Unlike her early pots in which animal designs were contained in separate blocks, now the image flows around the entire piece, often with remarkably intricate detail in both the creature and background. The artist especially enjoys dinosaurs, she says, because not everything is known about them, leaving room for her imagination.

Tafoya’s Santa Fe Indian Market Best of Show piece took about a month to produce, including countless hours of etching and painting. Viewed up close, she says, “Every individual scale on the dinosaurs, every pebble on the ground, every leaf and every tiny bug” was rendered with sgraffito and paint. Among her favorite details are an animal’s eyes. Through these “windows to the soul,” she says, “you can see the expressions of the animals and what they’re feeling—except for sea slugs, you can’t see their eyes,” she adds, laughing.

Tafoya’s household these days includes four lively corgis, and a large aquarium is home to her beloved pet bass, Tiberius, whose name was inspired by the middle name of Star Trek’s Captain Kirk. “I had a little bluegill named Spock, but I think Tiberius ate him,” she says. Tiberius was tiny when Tafoya netted him while catching minnows in a creek with her son, but he quickly grew to be huge. The second bass she’s had, he’s been with her for three years.

From both her parents Tafoya learned pottery skills, but from her father she also learned about cars. As a young woman she rebuilt and supercharged engines and raced her cars, until that hobby became too expensive. Now she maintains her boat and is learning to repair its motor. With mechanical work, she says, she feels a connection to her father, who died when she was 13. At the same time, producing pottery with contemporary designs using age-old Pueblo methods creates an even deeper bridge in time. “It’s a connection to the past, and it’s also the present,” she says. “It means a lot that I’m able to bring it all together.”

Colorado-based Gussie Fauntleroy writes for a variety of art publications and is the author of three books on visual artists. Learn more at gussiefauntleroy.com.

IMAGES COURTESY KING GALLERIES

contact information
jennifertafoya.com

representation
King Galleries, Scottsdale, AZ, & Santa Fe, NM, kinggalleries.com