Juan Quezada and the New Tradition

This is the catalogue that introduced Juan Quezada and the Mata Ortiz pottery phenomenon to an American museum audience. Self-taught in the Chihuahuan village of Mata Ortiz, Quezada rediscovered the techniques behind the ancient Casas Grandes (Paquime) polychromes, building, painting, and firing his thin-walled vessels without a wheel or kiln, and in doing so he sparked an entire village tradition that continues today.

Published in 1979 for the exhibition at California State University, Fullerton, it pairs text by Spencer Heath MacCallum, the anthropologist and trader who famously discovered Quezada's pots in a Deming junk shop and sought out their maker, with an essay by Charles C. Di Peso, the leading excavator of Casas Grandes. The sepia cover portrait of Quezada holding one of his ollas, and the bilingual interior pages, mark this as a foundational document. An early, important record of how one potter revived a thousand-year-old design vocabulary.