The Mata Ortiz Workshop . . .
March 21- 29 , 2009

Learn the methods and secrets of Mata Ortiz pottery making art to use back home in your own studio

This is a 9-day hands-on workshop that immerses us into the pottery ways of the amazing pottery village of Mata Ortiz, Chihuahua. We will stay in Mata Ortiz and work with Mata Ortiz master potter, Jorge Quintana, and Michael Wisner, an American potter and teacher who has studied under Mata Ortiz’ premiere master for 17 years. Through this exceptional teaching team and their connection to Mata Ortiz we gain very special access to this amazing pottery village. We will learn both the methods and secrets of Mata Ortiz pottery as well as materials and methods that we can use back home to create this kind of pottery in our own studios.

What is Mata Ortiz?

Perhaps the most amazing and exciting thing to happen in Mexican pottery in the last 30 years is what has happened in a little village called Mata Ortiz in the state of Chihuahua. In the course of three decades a town of cattlemen and unemployed railroad workers transformed itself into one of Mexico’s highest profile pottery villages and is now on the international collectors’ radar of a place to find superb and highly valuable pottery. The finest pots sell for thousands and thousands of dollars and are shown in galleries around the world.

All of this started with one man, Juan Quezada, back in the early 70’s. Having no pottery background whatsoever, but curious and clearly brilliant, Juan taught himself to make pottery based solely on the shards he found in the hills around the village. These shards, a thousand or more years old, where made by the ancient Paquime people, now long vanished. Between the shards and his brilliance Juan was able to find local clays, slips and teach himself how to create pots. When the pots started selling, first in a trickle, then in a torrent. Juan realized he had something and shared his knowledge with other villagers. Now there are some 400 potters in the Mata Ortiz area, and thus a pottery village was born. Or reborn.

Pot by Michael Wisner

In Mata Ortiz we will work with local clays, slips, pigments and fire in outdoor bon-firings. We will be taught to hand build pottery using the Juan Quezada large coil and pinch technique. Various methods for surface decoration will be taught including burnishing, texturing and painting. Using primitive and contemporary pit firing techniques, we explore how to create black-on-black and polychrome pottery. Our daily activities include traditional firings, human hair brush making, tool making, coiling, sanding, burnishing, surface decoration, kiln building, visits to village potters and clay digs in the mountains around Mata Ortiz.

We are fortunate and honored to have U.S. potter Michael Wisner, an accomplished potter and teacher, as a host for this workshop. Michael has studied under Juan Quezada for the last 17 years as his principle apprentice, thus gaining knowledge of the highest quality techniques used by Juan. Additionally, since 1989 he has worked out of the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, a world-renowned art center, where he has had contact with many of the best contemporary ceramic artists in the world. This has allowed him to take the Quezada technique and modify it to utilize many of the materials found in ceramic facilities. This empowers students to be able to continue traditional pottery techniques in their home studios and with commercial materials, and in many cases improve the strength and quality of their own pottery.

For this course Michael will be joining forces with skilled Mata Ortiz pottery, Jorge Quintana. Jorge, in addition to being an excellent potter, has worked for 20 years as a pottery buying rep. in the village, which has given him unique access to the many and varied potters in the village. As a result he is privy to the myriad of techniques, often jealously guarded secrets, which are used in the village.