Artes de México No. 45 is the defining reference on one of the most remarkable stories in the history of Mexican ceramics: a tradition lost for six hundred years, reconstructed by a single self-taught man in a small Chihuahuan village, and eventually celebrated in galleries and museums across North America. For collectors of Mata Ortiz pottery, this volume is less a companion to the work than a key to understanding it fully.
At the center of the story is Juan Quezada Celado, a farmer in the village of Mata Ortiz who, in the 1970s, began finding ceramic fragments near the ancient ruins of Paquimé. Paquimé, the great Casas Grandes civilization that flourished between the 13th and 15th centuries, had produced some of the most sophisticated pottery ever made in northern Mexico. Its traditions disappeared with the civilization itself. Quezada, working alone and entirely without formal instruction, spent fifteen years experimenting with local clays, natural pigments, and firing methods until he had recovered what scholars and archaeologists had considered unrecoverable. The geometry, the forms, the extraordinary thinness of the walls: he arrived at them through observation, intuition, and extraordinary patience.
The volume gathers six contributors whose perspectives together make a genuinely complete portrait of the tradition. Spencer H. MacCallum, the anthropologist who first encountered Quezada’s work at a trading post in New Mexico in the early 1970s and subsequently dedicated years to connecting Mata Ortiz artists with galleries and collectors, writes with the authority of someone present at the origin. Walter P. Parks, Beatriz Braniff, Marta Turok, Bill Gilbert, and Jim Hills bring archaeological, ethnographic, and art-historical depth. The result reads not as an exhibition catalog but as a sustained act of witness.
Artes de México has always been as much an object of design as a work of scholarship, and No. 45 is no exception. The photography throughout is stunning, doing full justice to the vessels’ painted surfaces, their geometric intricacy, and the quiet drama of their forms. The layout handles images and text with the elegance the series is known for, making the reading experience itself a pleasure. The copies we are offering are new and never used, in pristine condition. Both the softcover and hardcover editions are now out of print and difficult to find, and this volume was published in 1999, the same year Quezada received the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes.
A serious collection of Mata Ortiz pottery deserves a serious library to go with it. This volume belongs on the shelf alongside the pieces themselves.
