16 Facts About Margaret Tafoya

Maria Margarita "Margaret" Tafoya was the matriarch of Santa Clara Pueblo potters.

Margaret Tafoya was a recipient of a 1984 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.

Margaret Tafoya attended the Santa Clara Pueblo elementary school, and then the Santa Fe Indian School from 1915 to 1918.

Margaret Tafoya had to drop out of high school to help her family during the flu pandemic of 1918.

Margaret Tafoya occasionally made redware, micaceous clay storage jars and other smaller utilitarian forms.

Margaret Tafoya's father was primarily concerned with raising food for the family but he was known to make pottery and helped Sara Fina with many aspects of her pottery production.

Sara Fina allowed Margaret Tafoya to sell her first pottery to a dealer in Santa Fe, although Margaret Tafoya did not recall how much money she made that day.

For several years, Margaret worked as a cook and a waitress before she married Alcario Tafoya in 1924.

Alcario, a distant relative with the same last name, and Margaret Tafoya worked together making pottery just as her mother and father had done.

Early in her career, Margaret Tafoya often traded pottery for children's clothing or other household necessities to support her growing family.

Margaret Tafoya began selling her works at Indian art fairs such as the Santa Fe Indian Market and the Inter-Tribal Ceremonial at Gallup.

Margaret Tafoya continued her mother's tradition of making these exceptionally large pots, with finely polished surfaces and simple carved designs.

The labor-intensive techniques meant that Margaret Tafoya usually made only one large pot per year.

Margaret Tafoya's "bear paw" motif and deeply carved pueblo symbols like the Avanyu and kiva steps around the shoulder of her jars have become signature trademarks of the Tafoya family pottery.

Margaret Tafoya's work "reflected the transformation of the Santa Clara pottery tradition from the utilitarian to the artistic".

At the time of her death in February 2001, Margaret Tafoya had 30 grandchildren, 45 great-grandchildren, and 11 great-great-grandchildren.