Pottery of "Blue Corn"

All of the plates, bowls and jars on this page were created by "Blue Corn" of the San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico.

The Craftsmen Blue Corn, a Potter, Takes Her Materials From the Earth Itself A Tewa Indian, She Gathers Clay, Plants for Painting Just as Her Ancestors Did Success on a Quiet Morning

SAN ILDEFONSO PUEBLO, N.M. Blue Corn takes a wad of ocher clay in her hands and kneads it into a ball. Slapping the clay with her fist and fingers, she slowly molds the ball into the rough outline of a bowl and lays it into the puki, a saucer-shaped base.

She takes another handful of clay and rolls it between her palms until it forms a ropelike coil. As she winds the coil around the top of the bowl, Blue Corn pinches it flat into fluted ridges, melding one bit of clay into the other. She makes several more coils and places them on top of one another until the shape of a pot emerges from her hands and the clay.

With wet shards of gourd and her fingertips, she smooths the inner and outer In this assembly-line era, many people have come to put greater and greater premium on the work of the individual craftsman who makes something himself, with his very own hands. Some crafts are as new as the industrial age, and some are as old as mankind. This is the eighth and last in a series of articles about craftsmen in the 1970s.

Surfaces and gently massages them into symmetry. "There," she says softly, holding the still-damp creation at arm's length, "A pot." There is much more to do before she uses a polished stone to carve her signature and the pueblo's name on the bottom, but the shape is there, the structure completed, the craft awaiting the art.

Blue Corn is a Tewa Indian potter whose strong hands and obsidian eyes continue a tradition begun before Christ in the cliff dwellings and kivas of the Southwest. Today, traders and buyers agree that native American crafts are more popular than ever with tourists, collectors and museums. A prolific, competent potter can make $25,000 to $50,000 a year, according to one local trader, with a single pot sometimes fetching $4,000.

Blue Corn, who probably earns on the high side of that salary range, has seen the price of one of her pots climb to nearly $1,000 from about 15 cents when she began some 25 years ago, but her motivation remains that of someone who enjoys her work. "Pottery, pottery that's all I can think about," she says.(Indeed, Blue Corn is far from ostentatious about spending her money. She has improved the interior of her home, bought three vehicles for members of her family to drive and is helping a son build a new home, but a sizable portion of her earnings goes into savings or to help her tribe.) As pots and potters flood the market, some experts fear a decline in quality. "Before this trend, only a few professionals were producing consistently," observes Anita Da, owner of a San Ildefonso studio. "Now mass production is depleting the authenticity of traditional designs everybody wants to be an Indian." However, "there are still some great pieces being made," Rex Arrowsmith, a local trader, contends. "Buyers are coming out here from Saks, Magnin and Macy's and camping on the potter's doorstep."

Sixteen of the 19 pueblos in Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona have made pottery since their founders migrated here before the Christian era, but three pueblos have produced the most famous craftswomen San Ildefonso, Santa Clara and San Juan.

Like most northern New Mexico potters, Blue Corn works with the same materials in the same way as her prehistoric ancestors, the Mogollon Indians, who never developed the potter's wheel. Using the coil or ring method, they made strong jars, cooking pots and ceremonial vessels, the classic forms of pueblo pottery. Maria Martinez, now near 90, popularized the famous San Ildefonso burnished black matte ware during the 1930s. Currently, some potters have experimented with turquoise or beads imbedded in the clay, corrugated and multicolored pots and figurines.

Potters innovate in technique as well as style. A Santa Clara potter, for example, uses popsickle sticks and tongue depressors to smooth her pots. Other women dry their pots in electric ranges before firing. Stainless steel knives, tin-can lids, iron grates, commercial brushes and storebought paints have replaced traditional tools in many pueblos. While using these modern methods, other potters have revived ancient types, such as Potsuwi'i, or carved designs, pictographic pots and religious figures. Blue Corn is credited with reintroducing polychrome pottery, a fine white ware made from a special, and secret, clay source. (One of her granddaughters is named Polychrome Flower.) A genial, handsome woman of about 50, Blue Corn makes pots of several sizes and shapes, plates, figurines, bowls, ladles andwedding vases. Her work has won ribbons and prizes at numerous exhibitions, fairs and intertribal ceremonials. Richard Spivey, a prominent buyer for museums and Southwestern shops, ranks her among the best potters working today. Not only is she unique in reviving polychrome pottery, but also her work generally shows the graceful contours and disciplined lines common to the best kinaesthetic art.

She lives with her seven daughters and four sons, aged three to 28, in a large adobe home near the kiva, or ceremonial chamber, on the plaza of this pueblo. Her husband, Santiago, died last December on the birthday of two of his daughters. Santiago, a Santa Domingo Indian, had helped carve, design and paint her pots, a job now assumed by Joseph, the oldest son. Blue Corn gathers the materials for her pots the clays, sand, plants for making paint and dried manure for firing on the reservation. San Ildefonso lies among wind-chiseled buttes and arroyos about a mile from the Rio Grande and 11 miles from the Los Alamos atomic research laboratories. When she and two of her younger children walk through the pinon and cottonwood trees, the mesquite and creosote brush, they can see three snow-capped mountain ranges, as well as the haunting bulk of the sacred Black Mesa west of the reservation. “Come on,” she calls to Caroline and Craig, “let’s go look for some money.” The children refer to the dried cow and horse dung as “cinnamon rolls.” Once she has dug clay from the earth and shoveled sand into a bag, she returns home to pound the clay into a smooth, porous mass and to sift both clay and sand until they are free from sticks or rocks that might blister the pot in firing. After the clay soaks in water, she mixes it with the flour-like sand until it has the texture and color she desires.

Ordinarily, Blue Corn works at a large table inside her single-story home, adobe mud brick on the outside but pine-paneled and furnished in modern style within. In one corner of the living room there is a glass-windowed cabinet containing some of the ribbons she has won in the past two years. Hanging from the walls are Indian rugs, blankets and baskets for which Blue Corn has traded some of her pots. Near a bookshelf in the workroom is a 1961 color photograph signed by Lady Bird Johnson, shown looking over Blue Corn's shoulder as she makes a pot in the plaza of the pueblo. Above one doorway is a shelf holding a few of the last pots and bowls designed by her husband.

On a summer day, Blue Corn works in moccasins, blue slacks and blouse and a floral print apron as she cuts excess clay, off the pots with a paring knife, like peeling an apple. Then she begins to smooth the pot with sandpaper. As she rubs she talks about her work. “Girls today don't much want to make pots,” she says. “They know it gets their hands dirty, and they don't want to mess up their hands. I told my son that if he wanted a girl friend, not to take up pottery. Girls don't like rough hands.” Now the pot is ready for the slip, a liquid paint made from water and clay. The slip can be red, yellow or, in Blue Corn's case, the polychromatic white. Using a piece of soft cloth, she applies several coats of the slip to the outside of the pot. While the slip is moist, she begins to polish the pot with one of several smooth, shiny stones. Many such stones are heirlooms, handed from one generation to another, and Blue Corn often uses a stone given to her by her grandmother. Frequently changing stones, she polishes every inch of the pot until it reaches a high luster. She stands while shaping and scraping the pot; but now she sits. Sweat forms on her forehead below the red bahdana that keeps her black hair from her eyes. Her long fingers, already the same color as the clay, flex until her knuckles turn white around the polishing stone.

“My grandmother was blind,” she recalls, “but she used to take my face and hands into her hands and she told me, 'Blue Corn, forget about school. Stay home and do pottery. Your hands are made for pottery.'”

Outlining the Water Serpent

After polishing, since this pot is to be decorated, Blue Corn traces the design with a pencil on the outside of the pot. When he was alive, Santiago designed and painted all the pots, and it has been difficult for her to resume a technique she hadn't practiced in more than 15 years. Today, she sketches the outline of Avanyu, the water serpent, measuring distances with her fingers and constantly turning the pot to make sure her lines are true. Earlier, she boiled guaco, the juice of the Rocky Mountain bee plant, with sugar to make a thick black pigment. Now she takes an artist's paintbrush from which most of the bristles have been removed and slowly follows the penciled lines of the serpent. Until two years ago, she used the thin, looping fibers of the yucca plant, but now, like nearly every other potter, she uses a brush bought in a hardware store. Pausing to push her glasses off her nose, Blue Corn says many of her designs come “from my head,” others from illustrated books written by Anglo archaeologists about pueblo pottery. “Once they were digging a sewer through the village,” she says, “and they found a lot of old pieces of very old pots. I learned some designs from them and from the museum in Santa Fe.” After the paint dries and she has buffed the pots with a soft cloth, she clears her worktable and her daughters serve steaming platters of tamales and green chili wrapped in corn shucks, corn on the cob, bread baked in an outdoor oven and scalding coffee. While the children eat, Blue Corn sips a cup of coffee. She got up at 3:30 this morning to see if the weather would be good for firing, but it was too windy. She reminisces as she relaxes: “I remember once my husband and I went to San Diego to demonstrate on a television show. When we got out of the car, two men from the studio came and asked my husband where was our machine to make pottery. He pointed at me and said, 'There is my machine walking through that door.' When he told me what they said, I told them that I plugged myself into the wall in the morning, made pots all day and then unplugged myself at night to go to sleep.”

A Quiet Morning

Today there is a corn dance in the pueblo honoring the crop planting and St. Anthony. On the north plaza, two lines of men, women and children from San Ildefonso, in their flowing mantas, moccasins, headdresses and bells, sway to the rhythm of a ceremonial drum and the hypnotic chants of the tribal elders. Blue Corn has danced in many of these, but today she is anxious to finish enough pots to fire and sell to the traders and tourists who flock to her door. The evening is too windy. She rises about four on Sunday morning and looks The evening is too windy. She rises about four on Sunday morning and looks Out into the darkness. It is quiet. No wind is blowing. Behind her home, she builds a grill from several pieces of iron and slides shredded cedar under it for kindling. Joseph is up now, and as first light breaks over the mountains he helps her place the week's 14 pots upside down on the grate. Then they surround the pots with sheets of tin until they are completely enclosed. Next, cakes of dried cow and horse manure are stacked all around the square tin kiln. They light the kindling, and soon the dung smolders and burns sweetly. A grey feather of smoke rises into the calm air. Somewhere a dog barks. Firing is the last, and most crucial, step in making pottery. A potter spends days shaping, drying, polishing, carving and decorating her pots, but she may lose one or all of them during the firing. An errant draft can cause the fire to scorch and discolor the pots. Insufficient heat may warp a pot; too much heat can break it. Blue Corn remembers well the day she fired two large, intricately patterned plates that she hoped to enter in the New Mexico state fair: "I usually sold them for about $885 each. They were in the fire, and I heard a large crack! One of the plates had broken in the middle, and manure had fallen onto it. The other was also damaged. I sat down and cried. I gave up pottery for a week - I just couldn't do it. I didn't even enter anything. I heard that all these people were asking for my pots, and I was home crying."

Sweaty Goggles Today, the firing is successful. Blue Corn and Joseph move around the smoky fire prodding the dung cakes and cedar and peering with weeping eyes at the pots visible behind the flames. "Joseph once bought me what do you call them? those things you wear swimming - goggles for me to wear when firing pots," she says with a smile. "But I got so sweaty and couldn't see anything. I think that is why so many potters must wear glasses because the smoke damages our eyes."

After about an hour, they begin delicately to remove the manure with a rake and small shovel. When the kiln is clear, Joseph dons a pair of gloves and gingerly lifts the tin pieces from around the grill. His mother wipes her hands on her apron and bends over her pots clustered below. "I think they are okay," she says. "Oooh, I like the color of that one it's almost orange. But I don't like that yellow it looks too commercial." As they wait for the pots to cool, Blue Corn and Joseph sit near the grill and drink of cup of coffee. "I am so glad," she says with a sigh.

Blue Corn was born in San Ildefonso and attended school at the pueblo. Then she went to Santa Fe Indian school, 24 miles from home, and while she was there her mother and father died, a year apart. She couldn't attend either funeral nor that of the grandmother who had encouraged her to "forget school and become a potter."

At about 17, she went to Southern California to live with relatives and worked as a domestic in Beverly Hills.

MAY 1974

A Rough and Dirty Job

She married Santiago, also called Sandy Blue Corn, at ago 20. Like many Santa Domingo Indians, he was a silversmith and plied his craft briefly at a Santa Fe curio shop. During World War II, Blue Corn worked in Los Alamos as a housecleaner for J. Robert Oppenheimer ("He was very quiet and very nice," she says). Shortly after Joseph was born, she decided to take up pottery again. She had begun it once in the early years of her marriage, but "then it was so hard to get materials and so rough and dirty a job, so I quit it."

She soon found her calling. "Ever since I got away from school," she says, "my mind was on pottery, pottery where to get my clay, how to mix it, how to fire. My husband and I thought it was our best resource in raising our children, so he quit his job to help me with it." Blue Corn recalls the time early in her new career when they moved from San Ildefonso to Albuquerque: "We had no car, so we had to hitchhike. Here we were, walking along the highway, with my husband carrying Joseph on his back and a box of pots under one arm, and me carrying Michael on my back and a box of pots under my arm."

Those times seem long ago. Today her work is known and demanded nationally. Blue Corn doesn't have to leave her home to sell her pots; traders and tourists knock at all hours asking to buy. She doesn't even have a sign in front of the house. "If they want my pots bad enough, they'll find me," she says. Yet it's obvious that she takes her craft and her art seriously. Sitting one late afternoon with her chafed, blistered hands in her lap, she gazes out the window of her workroom. "Every night, she says softly, "before I go to bed, I come out here and look at my pots."