Collecting New Mexico Pueblo pottery & ceramics books — from prehistoric Mimbres bowls to contemporary master potters

Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred

Why a Pueblo pottery book reference

Pueblo Pottery & Ceramics Books Worth Collecting — New reference books are highly collectible, with early scholarly works commanding premium prices among Southwest art collectors. Pueblo pottery is the oldest continuous ceramic tradition in North America. The pueblos of present-day New Mexico and northeastern Arizona have been making pottery for at least two thousand years — a tradition that runs from the earliest Basketmaker-era gray wares through the magnificent Mimbres black-on-white bowls of the eleventh century, through the glaze-paint wares of the Rio Grande pueblos in the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries, through the near-collapse of many pottery traditions under Spanish colonial pressure, through the extraordinary revival movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the contemporary art pottery that commands museum exhibitions and five-figure prices at Santa Fe Indian Market. No other Native American art form has generated a comparable scholarly literature, and no other regional ceramic tradition in the Americas is as richly documented in English-language publications.

The institutional infrastructure behind this literature is identifiable and concentrated in northern New Mexico. The School for Advanced Research (SAR, formerly the School of American Research), through its SAR Press imprint and the Indian Arts Research Center (IARC), has been the most important institutional sponsor of Pueblo pottery scholarship since its founding in 1907. The University of New Mexico Press has published foundational pottery monographs from Kenneth Chapman through Rick Dillingham. The Museum of New Mexico Press (the publishing arm of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs) has produced reference works including Harlow’s Matte-Paint Pottery. The Museum of Indian Arts & Culture in Santa Fe holds the state’s institutional pottery collection and produces exhibition catalogues. The Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian has mounted pottery exhibitions with accompanying catalogues. The Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at UNM holds the major Mimbres pottery collection. And the Andrea Fisher Fine Pottery gallery on Canyon Road in Santa Fe — the leading commercial gallery for Pueblo pottery — has produced gallery catalogues that are themselves collector references.

This pillar walks the major streams of Pueblo pottery publishing, identifies the central titles in each, establishes the collector market, and explains why these books matter in 2026. The page is part of the reference infrastructure NMLP is building around regional book donation in central New Mexico — the operation that ensures a signed Harlow monograph or an early Dillingham catalogue is recognized for what it is when it surfaces in a donation pile rather than being discarded as an old art book.

Francis H. Harlow — the physicist who classified Pueblo pottery (1973–2003)

Francis H. Harlow was a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who became the most important systematic classifier of Pueblo pottery in the twentieth century. Harlow’s dual career — computational physics by day, pottery classification by decades of evening and weekend research — produced the taxonomic framework that every subsequent Pueblo pottery scholar, dealer, and serious collector has used or responded to. His method was scientific in the full sense: he developed classification systems based on measurable physical attributes (paint type, slip composition, vessel form, design grammar) rather than subjective aesthetic judgment, and he tested his classifications against large sample populations drawn from museum collections, archaeological excavations, and private holdings.

Harlow’s classification work extended over three decades. After Matte-Paint Pottery established the framework, he refined and expanded it through a series of publications that addressed individual pueblos with exhaustive detail. The most ambitious of these were produced in partnership with Dwight P. Lanmon, a glass and ceramics scholar who brought curatorial rigor and extensive photographic documentation to the collaboration.

Harlow’s earlier collaboration with Larry Frank produced another essential reference for the historic period.

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Rick Dillingham — Fourteen Families in Pueblo Pottery and the family-lineage approach (1992–1994)

Rick Dillingham (1952–1994) was an artist, potter, ceramics scholar, and gallery owner who brought a practitioner’s understanding to Pueblo pottery scholarship. Dillingham was himself a working potter whose own ceramic art — large vessels intentionally broken and reassembled with metallic repairs, bridging Japanese kintsugi aesthetics and southwestern clay traditions — earned him gallery representation and museum collections. But his most lasting contribution to the field was his scholarship, particularly two books that remain essential references thirty years after his early death from AIDS-related illness in 1994.

Dillingham’s death at forty-two deprived the field of what would likely have been a career’s worth of additional pueblo-specific studies. He had planned additional volumes; those plans died with him. What survives is the family-lineage methodology that he pioneered — an approach that subsequent scholars have adopted because it corresponds to how Pueblo people themselves understand their pottery traditions: not as abstract design categories but as knowledge held and transmitted within families.

Jonathan Batkin — Pottery of the Pueblos of New Mexico, 1700–1940 and the comprehensive historical survey (1987)

Jonathan Batkin was the director of the Taylor Museum at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center when he produced the most comprehensive single-volume historical survey of Pueblo pottery ever published. His book drew on the Taylor Museum’s own substantial Pueblo pottery holdings and on collections across the Southwest to document the full range of Pueblo pottery production from the early eighteenth century through the eve of the modern market period.

Batkin’s survey fills the chronological middle ground between Frank and Harlow’s Historic Pottery of the Pueblo Indians, 1600–1880 (which emphasizes the early historic period) and Dillingham’s Fourteen Families (which emphasizes the contemporary tradition). The three books together provide a documentary arc from initial European contact through the present — a span of four centuries of continuous ceramic production that is, in the breadth and depth of its documentation, unique in the literature of any indigenous art form.

Kenneth Chapman — The Pottery of San Ildefonso Pueblo and the man who helped create the revival (1970)

Kenneth Chapman (1875–1968) was an artist, teacher, and museum professional who played a direct role in the Pueblo pottery revival of the early twentieth century. As a founding member of the staff of the Museum of New Mexico and the School of American Research, Chapman was present at the creation of the institutional infrastructure that supported and promoted Pueblo pottery as both a living tradition and a collectible art form. He was not merely a scholar who documented pottery after the fact; he was an active participant in the revival movement, encouraging Pueblo potters to study and revive traditional designs, facilitating exhibition and sales opportunities, and building the museum collections that would serve as reference resources for subsequent scholarship.

Chapman’s role in the revival deserves careful emphasis because it shaped the institutional context in which all subsequent Pueblo pottery scholarship operated. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Chapman, Edgar Lee Hewett (the founding director of the Museum of New Mexico and the School of American Research), and a small circle of anthropologists, artists, and patrons recognized that Pueblo pottery traditions were in decline — pressured by the availability of cheap commercial wares, by the disruption of traditional Pueblo life, and by the absence of an economic market for traditional pottery. Their response was interventionist: they encouraged Pueblo potters to study historic sherds and museum collections, to revive traditional forms and designs, to sign their work for the collector market, and to exhibit and sell through institutions like the Museum of New Mexico and events like Santa Fe Indian Market (founded 1922). This intervention was controversial in ways that the participants did not fully acknowledge at the time — it involved non-Native patrons making consequential decisions about what constituted “authentic” Pueblo pottery — but it also contributed to the economic and cultural survival of multiple Pueblo pottery traditions that might otherwise have vanished.

Maria Martinez and the San Ildefonso blackware revolution

Maria Montoya Martinez (c. 1887–1980) of San Ildefonso Pueblo was the most famous Native American potter of the twentieth century and the subject of more published books than any other Pueblo artist. The literature on Maria is both a pottery reference and a primary source for understanding the revival movement that transformed Pueblo pottery from an endangered domestic craft into a collected art form.

The Maria Martinez story is inseparable from the history of the San Ildefonso blackware technique. Around 1918–1920, Maria and her husband Julian Martinez developed a method of producing polished black pottery decorated with matte-black designs — a technique that involved polishing the vessel surface to a high sheen with a polishing stone, then painting designs in a clay slip that would fire to a matte finish, then smothering the firing with powdered manure to create the reducing atmosphere that turned the iron-bearing clay black instead of the red or tan it would produce in an oxidizing fire. The resulting vessels — glossy black surfaces with contrasting matte-black painted designs — were visually striking and unlike anything else in the Pueblo pottery world. The blackware became enormously popular with collectors, tourists, and eventually museums, creating an economic engine that supported not only Maria and Julian’s household but much of San Ildefonso Pueblo for decades.

Additional Maria Martinez publications include Susan Peterson’s The Living Tradition of Maria Martinez (Kodansha International, 1977), which provides extensive photographic documentation and technical analysis; Peterson’s Lucy M. Lewis: American Indian Potter (Kodansha, 1984), which treats another major potter with comparable depth; and multiple exhibition catalogues from the Smithsonian, the Denver Art Museum, the Heard Museum, and Santa Fe institutions. The Maria Martinez bibliography is so extensive that a complete collection of Maria publications is itself a significant collector achievement.

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Nampeyo of Hano and the Sikyátki Revival — the Hopi-Tewa pottery renaissance

Nampeyo (c. 1860–1942) was a Hopi-Tewa potter from Hano village on First Mesa who initiated one of the most important aesthetic revivals in Native American art history. While Maria Martinez is often credited as the central figure of the Pueblo pottery revival, Nampeyo’s work preceded Maria’s by two decades, and the Sikyátki Revival she launched at Hopi arguably had deeper art-historical consequences because it involved not merely the recovery of a technique but the reinterpretation of an entire prehistoric design vocabulary.

The Sikyátki Revival takes its name from the prehistoric Hopi village of Sikyátki, which was abandoned before Spanish contact and excavated by the Smithsonian archaeologist Jesse Walter Fewkes in 1895. Fewkes’s excavation uncovered remarkable polychrome pottery — vessels decorated with curvilinear designs featuring stylized birds, feathers, butterflies, and bold asymmetric compositions that were strikingly different from the pottery being produced at the Hopi villages at the time. Nampeyo, who lived near the excavation site, studied the ancient Sikyátki sherds and vessels and began incorporating their design elements into her own work — not copying the prehistoric designs mechanically but reinterpreting them through her own artistic sensibility, creating a new pottery style that drew on ancient sources while remaining unmistakably contemporary.

The result was a pottery aesthetic of extraordinary power: low, wide-shouldered jars decorated with sweeping curvilinear designs in red, brown, and black on a warm yellow or cream ground, with the asymmetric compositions and negative-space mastery that distinguish Sikyátki-derived Hopi pottery from all other Pueblo traditions. Nampeyo’s revival transformed Hopi pottery and established a family dynasty that continues through her descendants, including Dextra Quotskuyva (Nampeyo’s great-granddaughter), who has carried the tradition into the realm of museum-quality contemporary art pottery.

J.J. Brody, Steven LeBlanc, and the Mimbres pottery tradition — the prehistoric masterwork

The Mimbres culture (c. 1000–1130 CE) of southwestern New Mexico produced some of the most remarkable painted pottery in the prehistoric Americas. Mimbres black-on-white bowls are decorated with figurative scenes of extraordinary graphic sophistication — depictions of animals (rabbits, birds, fish, insects, bighorn sheep, pronghorn antelope, mountain lions), humans (hunting, dancing, carrying loads, engaged in ceremonial activities), mythological beings (composite creatures, masked figures), and geometric designs of elaborate complexity. The figurative Mimbres bowls are among the most recognizable images in southwestern art, and their visual power has made them icons of prehistoric Native American creativity.

The Mimbres tradition has generated a scholarly and collector literature disproportionate to the culture’s geographical extent and temporal span. The Mimbres heartland was the Mimbres River valley and adjacent drainages in what is now Grant, Luna, and Sierra counties in southwestern New Mexico — a relatively small area that produced a ceramic art tradition of global significance during a period of approximately 130 years. The culture then disappeared (the Mimbres people migrated or were absorbed into other populations around 1130–1150 CE), leaving their pottery as the primary record of their artistic and cultural achievement.

Brody’s broader contribution to the field extends beyond the Mimbres study. His Indian Painters and White Patrons (University of New Mexico Press, 1971) examined the patronage relationships that shaped Native American art in the twentieth century — a topic directly relevant to the Pueblo pottery revival. His Anasazi and Pueblo Painting (University of New Mexico Press, 1991) treated the broader prehistoric and historic painting traditions of the Pueblo world. And his contributions to exhibition catalogues and museum publications at UNM and elsewhere constitute a substantial body of southwestern art scholarship that provides context for the Mimbres work.

The contemporary master potters — Tafoya, Cordero, Lewis, Quotskuyva

The collector literature on contemporary Pueblo pottery is organized around individual master potters and the family lineages they represent. Four figures stand at the center of the published record, each representing a distinct pueblo tradition and a distinct artistic contribution.

Margaret Tafoya (1904–2001) of Santa Clara Pueblo was the acknowledged master of large carved and polished pottery — massive blackware and redware storage jars, water jars, and wedding vases that combine technical virtuosity (the difficulty of hand-building and firing large vessels without cracking is extreme) with the carved designs that have become the hallmark of Santa Clara pottery. Tafoya worked within a family tradition stretching back through her mother, Sarafina, to earlier generations of Santa Clara potters, and she transmitted her knowledge forward to her children and grandchildren, creating the most prolific pottery dynasty in the contemporary Pueblo world. The major published reference is Mary Ellen and Laurence Blair’s Margaret Tafoya: A Tewa Potter’s Heritage and Legacy (Schiffer Publishing, 1986), which documents Tafoya’s work and family lineage with extensive photography. The Blair volume trades solid mid-range collectible value. Tafoya’s work is also treated extensively in Dillingham’s Fourteen Families and in multiple exhibition catalogues from Santa Fe and Albuquerque institutions.

Helen Cordero (1915–1994) of Cochiti Pueblo invented an entirely new ceramic form in 1964: the Storyteller figure. Cordero created clay figures of a seated adult (usually a grandfather) with multiple small children climbing on the body, their mouths open, listening to the stories being told. The form was inspired by Cordero’s memories of her grandfather Santiago Quintana, a noted Cochiti storyteller. The Storyteller figure became enormously popular and was adopted by potters at multiple pueblos, spawning an entire genre of figurative Pueblo pottery that had no prehistoric or historic precedent. Barbara Babcock and Guy and Doris Monthan documented the Storyteller tradition in The Pueblo Storyteller: Development of a Figurative Ceramic Tradition (University of Arizona Press, 1986), which traces the form from Cordero’s invention through its spread across the pueblos. The Babcock volume trades the mid-range collectible zone. Cordero’s work and the Storyteller tradition are also treated in Dillingham’s Fourteen Families.

Lucy Martin Lewis (c. 1898–1992) of Acoma Pueblo was the master of the fine-line geometric painting tradition — pottery decorated with intricate parallel lines, hatching, and geometric patterns of astonishing precision, all painted freehand without guides or rulers on the curved surfaces of thin-walled vessels. Lewis’s work achieved recognition through museum exhibitions and publications from the 1950s onward, and her family — daughters Emma Lewis Mitchell, Dolores Lewis Garcia, and others — continued and extended her tradition. Susan Peterson’s Lucy M. Lewis: American Indian Potter (Kodansha International, 1984) is the primary published reference, with extensive photography and biographical documentation. The Peterson volume trades the mid-range collectible zone. Lewis’s fine-line work has been the subject of multiple exhibition catalogues and is treated extensively in Dillingham’s Acoma and Laguna Pottery and Fourteen Families.

Dextra Quotskuyva (born 1928), Nampeyo’s great-granddaughter, has carried the Hopi-Tewa pottery tradition into the realm of museum-quality contemporary art. Quotskuyva’s work extends the Sikyátki Revival aesthetic that Nampeyo initiated, pushing it into increasingly refined and technically ambitious forms — vessels with extraordinarily thin walls, complex polychrome decoration, and designs that reference both ancient Sikyátki sources and Quotskuyva’s own artistic vision. Her work commands museum exhibitions and high-end gallery prices and is documented in exhibition catalogues from the Heard Museum, the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, and galleries including Andrea Fisher Fine Pottery. Quotskuyva’s career represents the fifth generation of the Nampeyo family pottery dynasty — an unbroken matrilineal transmission of ceramic knowledge spanning over 140 years.

SAR Press and the institutional publishers — the pottery publication infrastructure

The institutional publishers of Pueblo pottery literature constitute a coherent and identifiable infrastructure, concentrated in northern New Mexico and producing titles that range from popular introductions through specialist monographs to exhibition catalogues.

SAR Press (School for Advanced Research Press, Santa Fe) is the single most important institutional publisher of Pueblo pottery scholarship. The SAR’s connection to Pueblo pottery runs through its entire institutional history: the School of American Research (as it was known until 2007) was founded in 1907 as part of the same institutional movement that produced the Museum of New Mexico, the Laboratory of Anthropology, and the infrastructure of southwestern anthropological research. The SAR’s Indian Arts Research Center (IARC) houses approximately 12,000 objects, with Pueblo pottery as the strongest component of the collection. SAR Press has published Dillingham’s Acoma and Laguna Pottery, the Harlow/Lanmon Zia and Zuni volumes, Brody’s Mimbres Painted Pottery, and numerous exhibition catalogues and scholarly monographs drawn from the IARC collection. SAR Press titles are typically produced in modest print runs for a scholarly and collector audience; they are well-made but not mass-market, and first editions of the major titles are genuinely scarce.

University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque) has published foundational pottery references from Chapman’s San Ildefonso Pueblo through Dillingham’s Fourteen Families through Kramer’s Nampeyo and Brody’s multiple titles. UNM Press operates on a university-press model with modest print runs, but its distribution is broader than SAR Press’s, and UNM Press titles have generally remained in print or been reprinted more frequently. The UNM Press Pueblo pottery backlist is a significant component of any southwestern art reference library.

Museum of New Mexico Press (Santa Fe), the publishing arm of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, has published Harlow’s Matte-Paint Pottery and other pottery references drawn from the state museum system’s collections, particularly the holdings of the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture (MIAC) on Museum Hill in Santa Fe. MIAC houses the state’s institutional pottery collection and produces exhibition catalogues that document its holdings and temporary exhibitions.

Additional institutional publishers of Pueblo pottery literature include the University of Arizona Press (Babcock’s Pueblo Storyteller; multiple southwestern archaeology and Native art titles), Northland Press of Flagstaff (Spivey’s Maria; multiple Native American art titles), the University of Oklahoma Press (Marriott’s Maria; the Civilization of the American Indian series), Kodansha International (Peterson’s Lucy M. Lewis and Maria Martinez volumes), and Schiffer Publishing (the Blair Margaret Tafoya volume and multiple pottery collector guides). The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center published Batkin’s Pottery of the Pueblos. The Peabody Museum Press at Harvard published LeBlanc’s Painted by a Distant Hand.

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The collector market — what Pueblo pottery books are worth and where they trade

The Pueblo pottery book market reflects the broader market for Pueblo pottery itself: concentrated in the Southwest, anchored by serious collectors and dealers, and characterized by a core of genuinely scarce reference titles surrounded by a larger universe of affordable introductions and exhibition catalogues.

Tier one: foundational reference works (the mid-range to upper collectible zone). The most valuable Pueblo pottery books in the general market are the foundational classification and survey works that serious collectors and dealers rely on for attribution and reference: Harlow’s Matte-Paint Pottery (1973 first edition, the mid-range to upper collectible zone), Batkin’s Pottery of the Pueblos (1987, the mid-range collectible zone), the Harlow/Lanmon SAR Press volumes (the mid-range collectible zone each), and Chapman’s San Ildefonso Pueblo (1970, the mid-range collectible zone). These are books that were printed in limited institutional or academic-press runs, that are used as working references by people who buy and sell pottery, and that are difficult to replace when they wear out from use. Their value is functional as well as collectible — a clean copy of Harlow is worth more to a dealer who consults it weekly than to a shelf collector.

Tier two: major monographs and scholarly studies (the mid-range collectible zone). The middle market includes Dillingham’s Fourteen Families (solid mid-range collectible value in hardcover), Dillingham’s Acoma and Laguna Pottery (the mid-range collectible zone), Brody’s Mimbres Painted Pottery (1977 first, the mid-range collectible zone), LeBlanc’s Painted by a Distant Hand (the mid-range collectible zone), Spivey’s Maria (the mid-range collectible zone), the Frank/Harlow Historic Pottery (the mid-range collectible zone), Kramer’s Nampeyo (the mid-range collectible zone), and the major potter biographies. These are books with broader distribution that remain useful and wanted but are generally findable with patience.

Tier three: introductions, exhibition catalogues, and common editions (common reading copy range). This includes paperback editions of the major titles, UNM Press reprints, museum-shop publications, gallery catalogues, introductory guides to Pueblo pottery collecting, and general southwestern art surveys with pottery sections. These are the books that appear most frequently in donation piles; they have reference value and educational utility but minimal secondary-market value.

The signed-copy market in Pueblo pottery books is distinctive. Books signed by major Pueblo potters — Maria Martinez, Margaret Tafoya, Lucy Lewis, Helen Cordero — command substantial premiums over unsigned copies because the signature pool for each potter is closed (all four are deceased) and because pottery collectors value the intersection of the book and the potter’s hand. Books signed by pottery scholars — Harlow, Dillingham, Brody, Chapman — also carry premiums, though smaller ones. A copy of Fourteen Families signed by Dillingham (who died before the book’s publication; only advance copies were signed) would be a major find.

The prehistoric ceramic traditions — Anasazi, Mogollon, and the ancestral Pueblo pottery types

The published pottery literature extends backward from the historic and contemporary traditions into the prehistoric archaeological record, where the ceramic sequence provides the primary chronological framework for ancestral Pueblo cultures.

The Anasazi/Ancestral Puebloan ceramic tradition encompasses the pottery produced by the ancestors of the modern Pueblo peoples from approximately 500 CE through the period of European contact. The ceramic sequence — from Basketmaker gray wares through the black-on-white painted tradition of Pueblo II and Pueblo III through the glaze-paint wares and polychromes of Pueblo IV — is the backbone of southwestern archaeological chronology. Every major site report from Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, Bandelier, and the Rio Grande pueblos includes pottery analysis and illustration, and the pottery typology literature is enormous. H.S. Colton and L.L. Hargrave’s Handbook of Northern Arizona Pottery Wares (Museum of Northern Arizona Bulletin 11, 1937) and Anna O. Shepard’s Ceramics for the Archaeologist (Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1956) established the analytical frameworks that subsequent researchers have used. For the collector of Pueblo pottery books, the major site reports and pottery-typology studies from the major southwestern excavations (the Pecos Conference tradition, the University of New Mexico, the Museum of New Mexico, the National Park Service, the Smithsonian, and SAR) constitute a deep and specialized literature.

The Mogollon ceramic tradition — of which the Mimbres painted pottery discussed above is the most celebrated component — produced brown wares, red wares, and the remarkable Mimbres black-on-white series across a broad region of southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona. The broader Mogollon pottery literature includes publications on Casas Grandes/Paquimé pottery from northern Chihuahua (which extends the Mogollon tradition southward), Reserve and Tularosa black-on-white wares, and the corrugated utility wares that accompanied the painted tradition. Charles Di Peso’s monumental Casas Grandes: A Fallen Trading Center of the Gran Chichimeca (Amerind Foundation / Northland Press, 1974, 8 volumes) is the major reference for the southernmost extension of this tradition, though its interpretations have been extensively debated.

The glaze-paint tradition and the Rio Grande Pueblo ceramic sequence

The glaze-paint pottery of the Rio Grande pueblos (c. 1315–1700 CE) is a distinct ceramic tradition that has generated its own specialist literature. Unlike the matte-paint pottery that Harlow classified, glaze-paint pottery uses lead- or manganese-based pigments that fire to a vitreous, glossy finish. The glaze-paint tradition flourished in the central Rio Grande valley for approximately four centuries, produced at pueblos from Isleta and Sandia in the south through the Galisteo Basin pueblos to the Pajarito Plateau pueblos near present-day Los Alamos. The tradition ended in the early eighteenth century, possibly due to the disruption of lead-ore supply chains during the Pueblo Revolt period and its aftermath.

Harlow himself addressed the glaze-paint tradition in publications that complemented his Matte-Paint Pottery classification. Dwight Lanmon and Harlow produced additional documentation of glaze-ware types and chronology through SAR Press and other institutional channels. The glaze-paint pottery literature intersects with the broader archaeological literature on the Rio Grande Pueblo sequence, particularly the publications of the Laboratory of Anthropology, the Museum of New Mexico, and the UNM Department of Anthropology. For the collector, glaze-ware studies are more specialized and technical than the historic and contemporary pottery literature, but they are essential for anyone interested in the full depth of the Pueblo ceramic tradition.

The revival period — patrons, institutions, and the transformation of Pueblo pottery

The Pueblo pottery revival of the early twentieth century is itself a major subject of the published literature. The revival was not a spontaneous cultural phenomenon but the product of deliberate institutional intervention by a network of Anglo patrons, museum professionals, and anthropologists who recognized the declining state of many Pueblo pottery traditions and took action to reverse the decline.

The key institutional actors were Chapman and Hewett at the Museum of New Mexico and SAR; Mabel Dodge Luhan and her circle of artists and writers in Taos; the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway, which promoted Native American art and craft production as part of their tourism marketing; and dealers like Maria Chabot, who organized sales and exhibitions. The revival was concentrated in the period from approximately 1910 through 1940, during which time several Pueblo pottery traditions were revived, the system of signed individual pottery was established, Indian Market was founded, and the collector market for contemporary Pueblo pottery was created.

The published literature on the revival includes Chapman’s San Ildefonso Pueblo (as a primary participant), the Maria Martinez biographies (as accounts of the revival’s most famous product), and several studies that examine the revival as a cultural phenomenon: Brody’s Indian Painters and White Patrons (UNM Press, 1971), which examines the patronage system that shaped Native American art production; Bruce Bernstein’s work on Indian Market and the southwestern art market; and multiple institutional histories of SAR, the Museum of New Mexico, and the Laboratory of Anthropology. The revival literature is important for collectors because it explains how the contemporary Pueblo pottery world came into existence — why potters sign their work, why certain pueblos dominate the market, why certain forms and finishes command premium prices, and how the line between “traditional” and “market-responsive” pottery was drawn and redrawn over the course of the twentieth century.

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The museum and gallery infrastructure — where the pottery lives

The major Pueblo pottery collections are concentrated in institutions that have their own publication programs, and the publications produced by these institutions are themselves collector references.

The Museum of Indian Arts & Culture (MIAC) on Museum Hill in Santa Fe holds the state’s institutional Pueblo pottery collection — approximately 60,000 objects in the combined holdings of the MIAC and the Laboratory of Anthropology. MIAC’s permanent exhibition on Pueblo pottery and its rotating exhibitions produce catalogues that document both the collection and contemporary trends in Pueblo pottery. The Indian Arts Research Center at SAR houses approximately 12,000 objects, with Pueblo pottery as the strongest component — the IARC collection is a research collection accessible to scholars and Pueblo community members rather than a public exhibition collection, and its holdings have been documented in SAR Press publications.

The Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe, founded in 1937 by Mary Cabot Wheelwright and Navajo medicine man Hastiin Klah, has expanded its scope to include Pueblo pottery exhibitions with accompanying catalogues. The Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at UNM in Albuquerque holds the major Mimbres pottery collection that informed Brody’s Mimbres Painted Pottery. The Heard Museum in Phoenix holds a major collection of Pueblo and Hopi pottery and has published numerous exhibition catalogues. The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and National Museum of Natural History hold major Pueblo pottery collections assembled during the ethnographic-collecting era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Andrea Fisher Fine Pottery on Canyon Road in Santa Fe deserves special mention as the leading commercial gallery for Pueblo pottery. Founded by Andrea Fisher, the gallery represents many of the most accomplished living Pueblo potters and has produced gallery catalogues and publications that document contemporary work at a level of quality comparable to museum publications. Andrea Fisher catalogues are sought by collectors both for their content and as records of the contemporary market — prices and availability documented in gallery publications provide market data that is otherwise difficult to reconstruct.

What NMLP does with Pueblo pottery books — and what I want

Pueblo pottery books arrive in the donation stream regularly from Santa Fe and Albuquerque — from the estates of pottery collectors, from retired anthropologists and museum professionals, from gallery closings, and from general library cleanouts in a region where Pueblo pottery books are more commonly owned than anywhere else in the country. Many of these books are reference-level publications that retain significant utility and market value. The challenge is recognition: a Harlow monograph in institutional cloth looks like a dusty academic text to a non-specialist, and a Dillingham in paperback looks like a coffee-table book that has outlived its decorative purpose.

Categories I particularly want: Any Harlow title (the Matte-Paint Pottery first edition, the Zia and Zuni volumes with Lanmon, the Frank/Harlow Historic Pottery). Dillingham’s Fourteen Families and Acoma and Laguna Pottery. Batkin’s Pottery of the Pueblos. Chapman’s San Ildefonso. Any Maria Martinez biography or study (Marriott, Spivey, Peterson). Brody’s Mimbres Painted Pottery. LeBlanc’s Painted by a Distant Hand. Any SAR Press pottery publication. Andrea Fisher gallery catalogues. Wheelwright Museum exhibition catalogues. Museum of Indian Arts & Culture publications. Babcock’s Pueblo Storyteller. Blair’s Margaret Tafoya. Kramer’s Nampeyo. Peterson’s Lucy Lewis. Any signed pottery monograph — signed by potter or scholar. Bureau of American Ethnology reports with Pueblo pottery content (Fewkes, Stevenson, Cushing). Any pre-1950 Pueblo pottery publication. Older Indian Market catalogues and programs. Any Mimbres publication.