Sitting behind a potter’s wheel in downtown Santa Fe, I surrendered to the wet clay, digging my fingers in and watching as a bowl began to take shape. “Breathe,” said my instructor, Heidi Loewen, as I eased off the pedal. “When we’re learning a new sport, and I consider this a sport, we get excited and stop breathing.” She was right: I needed to catch my breath.
It’s safe to say I have a pottery problem. I used to buy cheeky mugs at Target, until I picked up a handmade one at an arts festival in Atlanta. Now I drink my coffee out of vessels crafted by cult-favorite makers like East Fork, from Asheville, North Carolina. I appreciate how no two pieces are alike and how ceramics, one of our oldest art forms, spans cultures and connects us across time. After all, clay is found nearly everywhere on earth and so, therefore, is pottery.
Mary Robnett
But few places have as rich a ceramics culture as Santa Fe. Pottery is an integral part of Native American life in the Southwest, and the city’s museums are filled with clay artifacts that date back centuries. There is also a thriving arts scene, with numerous galleries, studios, markets, and festivals dedicated to the craft. Even the city’s traditional adobe homes, it could be argued, are essentially inhabitable pottery.
I wanted a piece of this culture for myself, so earlier this year I headed west from Atlanta with my husband, Jon, and our young daughter. My heart skipped a beat when we arrived at Santa Fe Plaza, the heart of the historic downtown, and saw ceramics everywhere we turned.
With more than 250 galleries to choose from, I had to be strategic. First on my list was the venerable Andrea Fisher Fine Pottery, which was founded in 1993 and specializes in works from the region’s pueblos. I was struck by the sheer variety and quality of the pieces. I picked up a glossy black jar carved with dragonflies created by the artisan Daniel Begay, of the Santa Clara Pueblo. I was ready to buy it, but I wanted to explore more before committing so soon.
Next we strolled along Canyon Road, a half-mile-long stretch lined with about 80 galleries. Highlights included Morningstar Gallery, which carries Native American art, and Tierra Mar, which lured me with its contemporary sculpture garden out front. I was smitten with the whimsical works of the Chilean artist Andrea Pichaida, but didn’t think her delicate abstracts would survive our five-year-old daughter at home.
Mary Robnett
It had been a long day of travel, so we walked back to the Rosewood Inn of the Anasazi, an elegant, 58-room adobe hotel near the plaza with plaster walls, wooden beams, and kiva fireplaces. There was more pottery to behold: vases atop our mantle, and bowls on the library shelves.
In the morning, we had brunch at Café Pasqual’s, an adobe building where the celebrated chef Katharine Kagel serves organic New Mexican fare. The dining-room walls are covered with vintage geometric tiles made by the now-defunct Malibu Potteries. After feasting on stacked enchiladas, I wandered to the upstairs showroom, which was filled with crafts displayed on old wooden shelves.
Artisans give demonstrations there a few times a year, and that morning Clarence Cruz, a ceramics professor at the University of New Mexico and a member of the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, explained his specialty, cookware made from clay mixed with mica. “I harvest all my materials,” Cruz said as he coiled a length of mud-brown clay, flecked with golden mica, into a bowl and smoothed it out on a potter’s wheel. As he pinched the layers, it morphed into a pot with a wide base.
Since the piece needed to air-dry for a couple of days before being fired, he showed me a few finished examples. Curvaceous and smooth, his creations have a subtle shimmer from the melted mica. I wanted to take home a bean pot, but opted for a carry-on-friendly plate.
To learn about the city’s ceramic history, I visited the Indian Arts Research Center, a museum with two vaults that together hold more than 12,000 relics from the state’s 19 pueblos. The vaults are considered hallowed ground: Native visitors often pray upon entering, Jim Regnier, a volunteer docent, told me. “They view these pots as living,” he said.
After looking at so many beautiful works, it was time to get my hands dirty, so the next day I went to Heidi Loewen Porcelain, a gallery and school. For two hours, I had the master ceramist all to myself. With her guidance, I made two bowls and a vase that would later be glazed and shipped to my home. Learning a craft was at once thrilling and exhausting, and it gave me a deeper understanding of the effort that goes into every piece.
I joined my family at Tumbleroot Pottery Pub, a bar with potter’s wheels. “What’s my favorite thing in the world? Sitting around, playing with clay, and drinking cocktails,” said Angela Smith Kirkman, who started the pub with her husband, Jason Kirkman. It’s the kind of place I wish every city had. We ordered cherry limeades (which were served in glazed tumblers) and slabs of sculpting clay. Instead of scrolling on our phones, my husband and I chatted as he made a pinch pot, I sculpted an abstract shape, and my daughter smothered her clay in paint.
That night, we stayed at the Inn of the Five Graces, which has 24 suites carved from a string of adobe buildings, each decorated with embroidered curtains from Uzbekistan, detailed wood carvings from Tibet, and teal vases from Afghanistan. The bathrooms had intricate, hand-laid mosaic murals. I felt like I was staying in a royal palace in the desert.
I surveyed my souvenirs. Of the five pieces I had purchased, one stood out. It was from the Railyard Artisan Market, which is held every Sunday in a converted warehouse. There I had met Irvin Louis, a potter from the Acoma Pueblo, who uses a time-consuming technique involving horsehair that leaves the surfaces of his round vases looking like polished marble. The closer I looked, the more details emerged: line drawings of men and women, outlines of jagged mountains, small dots of turquoise.
Louis told me that the piece depicted his family, who call themselves the Yellow Corn Clan, performing a rain dance. I wrapped it gently and placed it in my suitcase. Now a piece of his family lives with mine, forever linked through pottery.
A version of this story first appeared in the November 2024 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Down to Earth.”
