Lydia Quezada's "Work of Inspiration"

It was another tedious bus ride for Rito Talavera. Having grown up in Anchando, a tiny pueblo near Nuevo Casas Grandes, he was wearily accustomed to spending too much time commuting on ramshackle old buses. Still, how fortunate that there's a bus at all, he thought, reminding himself to count his blessings. As he did, a young woman with beautiful hair caught his eye. She, too, was standing on the crowded bus, swaying gracefully to keep her balance on the bumpy road. Suddenly, the bus lurched and swerved in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid a particularly large pothole. With a great thud the vehicle bottomed out in the crater, throwing passengers forward then thrusting them backward as it bounced up and out of the hole. The lovely young woman with the beautiful hair fell back into Rito's chivalrous arms. She appeared to be at once embarrassed, frightened, and charmed. Rito overcame his reserve to ask her name. "Lydia Quezada," she said. In 1979, less than one year after their meeting on this fateful bus ride, Lydia Quezada and Rito Talavera were married.

Lydia Quezada is the youngest sister of Juan Quezada, the Mata Ortiz potter.. Her earliest memories of home are colored with the incipient artistic genius of her legendary brother.

"He would color the walls in a little room with his homemade paints. I remember my mother would say he was always covered in dirt of many colors from his experiments with minerals and clay. I think from when Juan was small, the art was something that he had within him. It wasn't easy to have done all this without anything. Sometimes I would think to myself, 'How did he do this? Who taught him?' Nobody taught him anything. This was something he had within him when he was born. To me this is very important."

Lydia was one of Juan's first and most talented students. Using only the natural, primitive pottery techniques that Juan espoused, Lydia originally concentrated on creating effigies and monos, the animal and human figures that are part of the ancient Casas Grandes legacy on which contemporary Mata Ortiz pottery is based. Lydia's early figures, most of them snails and macaws, were rapidly made and quickly sold to take advantage of the flurry of interest in regional pottery brought on by the archaeological exploration of Paquimé.

From 1958 to 1961, the Amerind Foundation of Dragoon, Arizona, and the Mexican Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia jointly funded an archaeological dig at Paquimé. The expedition, led by Dr. Charles Di Peso, explored numbers of mounds rich in archaeological significance. Of note was the abundance of ancient Casas Grandes pots, indicating that Paquimé had been a trading center during the Casas Grandes civilization of approximately AD 1250-1400. Di Peso's findings stimulated interest in northern Mexico's contemporary pottery. The growing market for prehistoric-style twentieth-century pottery created a new facet to the border economy and a career option for truly talented artists like Juan and Lydia Quezada and their contemporaries in Mata Ortiz and beyond. Local traders were the first people to recognize the value of the Quezadas' work. They purchased a variety of Mata Ortiz pottery, including many pieces by Lydia, to sell in the United States.

The first generation of Quezada artists—Juan and his siblings Consolación, Reynalda, Jesús, Genoveva, Nicolás, Rosa, Reynaldo, and Lydia—initially created work that closely resembled ancient pots from Paquimé. According to Lydia, in the beginning they made many animal effigies because that was what tourists and American traders wanted. In addition to effigies, these early Mata Ortiz artists made polychrome pots with boldly painted diagonals, mazes, and animal figures, again recalling the work of Paquimé. Like her brother Juan, Lydia received a stipend from Spencer MacCallum, an American whose patronage of Mata Ortiz pottery helped introduce the work to more American collectors. After receiving MacCallum's stipend, Lydia remembers being free to refine her work with pots, rather than monos and effigies. "I began to produce better work, more pots," she says. Feeling more financially...