Maria and Julian Martinez pioneered a style of applying a matte-black design over polished-black. She lived as a proper Pueblo woman, avoiding self-aggrandizement and insisting to scholars that she was just a wife and mother even as her reputation in the outside world increased. Helping her Pueblo was of paramount importance to Ms. Martinez was known to have signed the pots of others, lending her name to help the community. Though this denied the communal nature of the art, she began to do so as it resulted in more money per pot.

Martinez was encouraged to sign her name on the bottom of her pots. As the pots moved into a fine art market, Ms. Throughout her career, she worked with different family members, including her husband Julian, her son Adam and his wife Santana, and her son Popovi Da. Martinez would form the perfectly symmetrical vessels by hand and leave the decorating to others. The potters helped each other with the arduous tasks such as mixing the paints and polishing the slip.

Making ceramics in the Pueblo was considered a communal activity, where different steps in the process were often shared.

Even without kilns, the ceramists were able to create a fire hot enough to transform the pot by using manure. These would be dried but required a high temperature firing to change the brittle clay to hard ceramics. Over the polished slip the pot was covered with designs painted with an iron-rich solution using either pulverized iron ore or a reduction of wild plants called guaco. The slip was polished by rubbing a smooth stone over the surface to flatten the clay and create a shiny finish-a difficult and time-consuming process. The dried vessel needed to be scraped, sanded, smoothed, then covered with a slip (a thin solution of clay and water). When mixed with water, the elasticity of the clay and the strength of the temper could be formed into different shapes, including a rounded pot (known as an olla) or a flat plate, using only the artist’s hands as the potting wheel was not used. To make the pottery stronger it had to be mixed with a temper made from sherds of broken pots that had been pounded into a powder or volcanic ash. All the raw materials had to be gathered and processed carefully or the final vessel would not fire properly. She learned the ceramic techniques that were used in the Southwest for several millennia by watching potters from San Ildefonso, especially her aunt Nicholasa as well as potters (including Margaret Tafoya from Santa Clara), from other nearby Pueblos. Her mastery as a ceramist was noted in her village while she was still young.

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