Althea Dotzour
The exhibit in Monroe includes this bowl by Elias Peña.
Nearby Monroe, in Green County, is exhibiting what is arguably the best pottery made in the world today. And how it got there is a hell of a story.
Mata Ortiz Pottery: Rebirth of a Mexican Village — in the gallery of the Monroe Arts Center through March 29 — is drawn from the collection of Madison’s Terry Haller, a philanthropist and retired hotel executive. The works come from the small Mexican town of Mata Ortiz, fewer than 100 miles south of the U.S. border.
Never heard of it? Neither had Haller. But in 2012 he was visiting Saguaro National Park East, near Tucson. He was in the gift shop, “where I rarely find anything, not being a consumer of T-shirts and the like,” he recalls. But Haller was about to undergo a moment of illumination.
There was a case of pots. “I went over to look, and boom! I was completely transfixed,” he says. “This was extraordinary. I frankly had never seen anything like it.”
Haller asked a clerk to open the case. The clerk asked what he wanted to look at. “And I said, ‘I want to see everything.’ I went through the pieces carefully and I came out with seven or eight pieces. He said it was the largest sale he had ever made.
The pieces were from Mata Ortiz, today a village of potters, population just more than 1,000, in the state of Chihuahua. When the railroad repair yard relocated in the 1960s, the town slid into poverty.
Then an unlikely turn-around occurred after a curious farmer, Juan Quezada, began studying ancient ceramic shards recovered from the nearby Casa Grandes archeological site, where a rich artistic culture peaked in the 1400s.
He experimented with local clays, sands and minerals, eventually recreating the lost Casa Grandes process. It spread from family to family in the 1980s, becoming a local artistic movement.
In the southwest United States today, Mata Ortiz ceramics are critically acclaimed and highly sought. Some works sell for as much as $5,000, though the median is around $100. It’s been an economic miracle for the village, though the bar is set pretty low.
“If you go down there even today, maybe 30 or 40 years after the phenomenon started, many of the artists — some really good artists — are living in essentially what you would call poverty,” says Haller.
Haller says he was “completely captivated” after he discovered the nature of the work and the story behind it. He has since visited the town several times. “It’s a fascinating village. Probably about 500 families, and I’ve gotten to know a good many of them.”
Althea Dotzour
The Mexican village of Mata Ortiz experienced a renaissance after a farmer began reviving ancient pottery practices in the 1960s.
The artists do not merely re-create forgotten pottery. Instead they’ve expanded upon it, making it their own, sharing family and individual approaches to design.
“They’re still pushing the boundaries, and everybody is kind of going off on their own thing,” says Haller. “It’s fascinating. I honestly can’t think of another instance like this anywhere that I’m aware of.”
In the Monroe Arts Center, under natural light, the burnished pieces seem almost to glow. There are free-form shapes, pitchers, amphorae, shallow bowls, plates. Many are in a style the artists call “dibujos locos,” or “crazy lines.” Using a brush made from a single hair — a child’s hair, for its softness — they paint impossibly tiny, detailed curves within curves, angles within angles, perfectly repeating over and over until they resemble fractals. The process involves no plotting of shapes, no pencil marks; it is geometric genius.
It’s no wonder the designs immediately appealed to Haller, who received his master’s degree in mathematics from UW-Madison. In 2015, he helped his Mexican friend, Denisse Acosta, bring around 160 pieces to the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art for sale (Haller derives no financial benefit from this). The Monroe Arts Center also has a number of Mata Ortiz pieces available in its gift shop. Prices range from $11 to around $350.
Although Haller champions the work of the village potters, he does not want to become an art dealer. “I would like to help the people in Mata Ortiz, which is one of the reasons I’m doing this,” he says. “They are wonderful people.” Meanwhile, their sales are in a slump, owing to American tourists’ fear of visiting Mexico.
Acosta, who visited Monroe to speak about the exhibit, lives five minutes from the village of Mata Ortiz, in an old hacienda. She promotes the work of the villagers by helping artists find buyers. “That lets me help a family get some income, since they live off of their art,” she says. “So it is a win-win.”
