Anita Suazo
Santa Clara
Like her sisters, Mae Tapia and Anna Archuleta, Anita Suazo (b. 1937) learned the basics of the traditional form of her craft from their mother, Belen Tafoya Tapia. A first cousin of Margaret Tafoya, Belen was known for beautiful polychrome slipped, painted and carved redware and blackware. Anita's specialties include carved blackware, carved, slipped and painted polychrome redware, and melon pots. Often collaborating with her husband, Joseph Suazo, Anita made blackware and redware, polychrome redware, two-tone black on black carved pottery and black melon pots. She liked to carve some pots and paint others with avanyu, kiva step, cloud, feather and other designs passed down from a thousand years ago, and more.
Anita first entered a piece in the juried competitions of the Santa Fe Indian Market in 1979 and was consistently winning ribbons ever since from Indian Market, the Eight Northern Indian Pueblo Arts & Crafts Show and the New Mexico State Fair. She was a participant, along with Margaret Tafoya and 42 other Santa Clara potters, in a 1985 show at the Sid Deusch Gallery in New York. In 1986 she won the Jack Hoover Memorial Award for excellence in Santa Clara pottery. Pieces of her work can be seen at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC, the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos and the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe.
Anita taught pottery classes at the University of California at Davis and at the University of New Mexico. She retired from making pottery around 2010.
Some of the Awards Anita Won
- 2011 Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market. Class II - Pottery, Div. C - Traditional, native clay, hand built, carved, Honorable Mention
- 2004 Santa Fe Indian Market. Class II - Pottery, Div. C - Traditional pottery, carved or incised, Cat. 1001 - Jars, Third Place
- Cat. 1002 - Wedding jars, Second Place - 2000 Santa Fe Indian Market. Class. II - Pottery, Div. C - Traditional pottery, carved or incised, Cat. 1004 - Bowls (over 7" in diameter), Second Place
- 1997 Santa Fe Indian Market. Class II - Pottery, Div. B - Traditional pottery, undecorated, Cat. 903 - Melon bowls, Third Place
- 1995 Santa Fe Indian Market. Class. II - Pottery, Div. B - Traditional pottery, undecorated, Cat. 902 - Jars (over 9 inches tall), Third Place
- Div. D - Traditional pottery, carved, Cat. 1101 - Jars (up to 7 inches tall), Second Place - 1993 Santa Fe Indian Market. Class II - Pottery, Div. E - Traditional pottery, undecorated, Cat. 903 - Melon bowls and jars, black, Second Place
- 1992 Santa Fe Indian Market. Class II - Pottery, Div. B - Traditional pottery, undecorated, Cat. 905 - Other bowls, First Place
- Div. E - Traditional pottery, painted designs on burnished black or red surface, Cat. 1206 - Figures, Third Place - 1991 Santa Fe Indian Market. Class II - Pottery, Div. B - Traditional pottery, undecorated, Cat. 901 - Jars (to 8 inches), Third Place
- 1990 Santa Fe Indian Market. Class. II - Pottery, Div. E - Traditional pottery, painted designs on burnished black or red surface, Cat. 1104 - Bowls (over 8 inches in diameter), Third Place
- 1989 Santa Fe Indian Market. Class II - Pottery, Div. B - Traditional pottery, undecorated, Cat. 803 - Melon bowls, black, Third Place
- Cat. 805, other bowls, Second Place - 1988 Gallup InterTribal Ceremonial. Class IV - Pottery, Cat. 10, Jar, seed jar, canteen, Second Place
- 1986 Santa Fe Indian Market. Jack Hoover Memorial Award for Excellence in Santa Clara Pottery
- Class II - Pottery, Div. B - Traditional pottery, undecorated, Cat. 803 - Melon bowls, Second Place
- 1984 Santa Fe Indian Market. Class II - Pottery, Div. E - Traditional pottery, painted designs on burnished black or red surface, Cat. 1101 - Jars (up to 8 inches tall), Third Place
- 1983 Santa Fe Indian Market. Class II - Pottery, Div. D - Traditional, carved, Third Place
100 West San Francisco Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501
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Santa Clara Pueblo
Ruins at Puye Cliffs, Santa Clara Pueblo
Santa Clara Pueblo straddles the Rio Grande about 25 miles north of Santa Fe. Of all the pueblos, Santa Clara has the largest number of potters.
The ancestral roots of the Santa Clara people have been traced to the pueblos in the Mesa Verde region in southwestern Colorado. When that area began to get dry between about 1100 and 1300, some of the people migrated to the Chama River Valley and constructed Poshuouinge (about 3 miles south of what is now Abiquiu on the edge of the mesa above the Chama River). Eventually reaching two and three stories high with up to 700 rooms on the ground floor, Poshuouinge was inhabited from about 1375 to about 1475. Drought then again forced the people to move, some of them going to the area of Puye (on the eastern slopes of the Pajarito Plateau of the Jemez Mountains) and others to Ohkay Owingeh (San Juan Pueblo, along the Rio Grande). Beginning around 1580, drought forced the residents of the Puye area to relocate closer to the Rio Grande and they founded what we now know as Santa Clara Pueblo on the west bank of the river, between San Juan and San Ildefonso Pueblos.
In 1598 Spanish colonists from nearby Yunque (the seat of Spanish government near San Juan Pueblo) brought the first missionaries to Santa Clara. That led to the first mission church being built around 1622. However, the Santa Clarans chafed under the weight of Spanish rule like the other pueblos did and were in the forefront of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. One pueblo resident, a mixed black and Tewa man named Domingo Naranjo, was one of the rebellion's ringleaders. When Don Diego de Vargas came back to the area in 1694, he found most of the Santa Clarans on top of nearby Black Mesa (with the people of San Ildefonso). An extended siege didn't subdue them so eventually, the two sides negotiated a treaty and the people returned to their pueblo. However, successive invasions and occupations by northern Europeans took their toll on the tribe over the next 250 years. The Spanish flu pandemic in 1918 almost wiped them out.
Today, Santa Clara Pueblo is home to as many as 2,600 people and they comprise probably the largest per capita number of artists of any North American tribe (estimates of the number of potters run as high as 1-in-4 residents).
Today's pottery from Santa Clara is typically either black or red. It is usually highly polished and designs might be deeply carved or etched ("sgraffito") into the pot's surface. The water serpent, ("avanyu"), is a traditional design motif of Santa Clara pottery. Another motif comes from the legend that a bear helped the people find water during a drought. The bear paw has appeared on their pottery ever since.
One of the reasons for the distinction this pueblo has received is because of the evolving artistry the potters have brought to the craft. Not only did this pueblo produce excellent black and redware, several notable innovations helped move pottery from the realm of utilitarian vessels into the domain of art. Different styles of polychrome redware emerged in the 1920's-1930's. In the early 1960's experiments with stone inlay, incising and double firing began. Modern potters have also extended the tradition with unusual shapes, slips and designs, illustrating what one Santa Clara potter said: "At Santa Clara, being non-traditional is the tradition." (This refers strictly to artistic expression; the method of creating pottery remains traditional).
Santa Clara Pueblo is home to a number of famous pottery families: Tafoya, Baca, Gutierrez, Naranjo, Suazo, Chavarria, Garcia, Vigil, Tapia - to name a few.
100 West San Francisco Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501
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Belen Tapia Family Tree
Disclaimer: This "family tree" is a best effort on our part to determine who the potters are in this family and arrange them in a generational order. The general information available is questionable so we have tried to show each of these diagrams to living members of each family to get their input and approval, too. This diagram is subject to change should we get better info.
- Belen Tapia & Ernest Tapia
- Leonard Tapia & Romancita Gutierrez
- Anita L. Suazo & Joseph Suazo
- Gayle Leyva & Phil Leyva
- Angel Suazo-Peter
- Leonard Suazo
- Jason "White Eagle" Suazo and Lahoma Suazo
- Cyrus Suazo
- Joseph Suazo Jr.
- Paul Tapia
- Frank Tapia & Mae Tapia
- Bennie Tapia & Gail Gutierrez
- Anna Archuleta & Fidel Archuleta
Some of the above info is drawn from Pueblo Indian Pottery, 750 Artist Biographies, by Gregory Schaaf, © 2000, Center for Indigenous Arts & Studies
Other info is derived from personal contacts with family members and through interminable searches of the Internet and cross-examination of the data found.
(505) 986-1234 - www.andreafisherpottery.com - All Rights Reserved