Pueblo pottery is the oldest and most developed pottery industry associated with women’s traditions. Maria Martinez set the direction by honoring, even partially reviving, age-old practices, and presenting wares imbued with her own culture to new audiences. Pottery continues to fuel the Native American economy in the American Southwest.

Forms, practices, and designs are specific to individual pueblos and carried out by successive generations of pottery families. While fidelity to tradition is an important marketing concern, many younger artists vigorously expand the boundaries of their medium beyond conventional norms. Pottery families intermarry, and members of other regional tribes without notable ceramics traditions become potters, integrating design elements from metalwork and other indigenous crafts into their pottery. What was traditionally women’s work is now the province of both women and men artists. 

Anglo missionaries discouraged indigenous people from creating figurines, but in the 1880s, ceramists from the Cochiti Pueblo began to create clay caricatures of Anglo types—the businessman, the cowboy, and the carnival player. Such figurines were labeled inauthentic and kitschy by collectors in the 20th century who valued the simple lines and elegant forms of functional vessels. The figurine became popular again after the 1960s when Helen Cordero made the first storyteller figure based on a memory of her grandfather. The form has spawned many versions and enjoys great popularity charged with both authenticity and sentimentality. Among the current generation of Cochiti artists, the Ortiz family create figures that are much more edgy in their contemporary re-working of the 19th-century satirical tradition.