Looking Forward
While the potters expressed serious concerns about ensuring that the legacy of San Felipe pottery is carried into future generations, there was also an enormous amount of hope and an incredible desire to spark interest and support the creativity of the youth. Ricardo Ortiz summed it up with the following: “One of these days, one of your children will wake up and it’s going to brighten their eyes and they’ll say, ‘Oh, I’ll go into [pottery].’ Maybe now they’re not going to be interested in it, but sooner or later they will.”
“I would like to say to the future potters that are coming up in San Felipe Pueblo, I hope that you share your information, your teachings, your techniques, and your clay sources with the young people, to keep this pottery tradition alive.”
For these seven artists, pottery making has come to them in different ways, and they have chosen to express their creativity in a multitude of manners through the clay whether via process, material, or idea. They look forward to sharing their knowledge so that this evolution in clay can continue well into the future.
San Felipe students at IARC
San Felipe Pueblo Elementary School students visit the Indian Arts Research Center to study historical San Felipe pottery before returning to the Pueblo for a pottery workshop in May 2013. Photograph courtesy of Ansulala