Native Arts

Gussie Fauntleroy

Potter Jennifer Moquino digs hot cars and cool fish

There are a few things about Jennifer Moquino one might not guess upon first encountering her sweetly shy smile. Besides being an award-winning Santa Clara Pueblo potter whose finely etched and painted vessels reflect a lifelong love of animals (including a now-deceased pet bass named Big B), the 30-year-old is a fast-car buff who can rebuild engines and turbo-charge cars and then race them on the track, fearlessly holding the pedal to the floor. She’s also a proud mother who beams as she tells of her son Ty’s pottery taking first place at Santa Fe Indian Market when he was 3. “He beat me that year!” she laughs.

Moquino’s pottery involves much more than initially meets the eye as well. The artist and her husband, Michael Moquino, also a potter, share the labor-intensive work of gathering and processing clay: sifting, mixing, kneading. Jennifer coils the clay and builds her pots by hand, following age-old Pueblo tradition. She polishes them to a deep sheen using a polishing stone and fires them in an outdoor, wood-burning fire, using manure to darken the surface when producing blackware.

She and Michael gather clay and minerals in various colors, including hard-to-find yellows, greens, and blues, with which she paints the etched imagery on her pots. “We do a lot of hiking and a lot of looking along the side of the road for certain colors,” she explains, sitting with Michael at the dining table in their Santa Clara home.

After the firing—a process in which pottery can easily crack or break—Moquino skillfully etches delicate designs using sgraffito, a method of surface carving that gained popularity beginning in the late 1960s and early ’70s through the work of such potters as Tony Da of San Ildefonso Pueblo and Joseph Lonewolf and Grace Medicine Flower of Santa Clara. Finally, she grinds and mixes natural pigments and adds delicate color to her work.

Like most Pueblo potters, Moquino grew up exposed to the timeless yet time-consuming activities involved in working with clay. Her parents, Ray and Emily Suazo Tafoya, were both potters, and young Jennifer started shaping clay into small animal forms when she was 6. Soon her father taught her to etch designs into the surface of the clay. Her father, who died when she was 13, also was her entrée into the world of engine mechanics; as a young girl she watched, and often helped, him work on cars.

Moquino’s early clay creations were simple; for example, clay lizards adorned with Pueblo-inspired and geometric line designs. But her pottery and sgraffito developed quickly, especially after she began dating and then married Michael. (Michael’s father, Corn Moquino, is an award-winning artist who owns a shop on the pueblo where he sells his pots.) Before she and Michael met, Moquino had been shaping balls of clay into solid- body animals; he taught her to coil-build hollow, gracefully shaped vessels. In 1999, she devoted herself to art full time.

Today the couple often collaborates, with Michael building small pots, including miniature seed pots and lidded jars, and Jennifer adding animal-inspired designs. Jennifer also creates and etches larger vessels, up to 10 inches tall. For venues such as Santa Fe Indian Market, she does all aspects of the work herself. In recent years her art has earned best of division, best of classification, and numerous first-place awards at Indian Market, the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market, and other shows. Her pots are in permanent collections at the Heard Museum and the Denver Art Museum, and her work was included in the national traveling exhibition, Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation.

For a number of years Moquino’s pottery was known for its delicate fish designs. She traces the origins of that imagery to the time when she and Michael were first dating. He had a pet catfish in an aquarium, and she was intrigued.

So he took her to a pond on the pueblo where she was able to catch (without hurting) a tiny yellow fish with black spots and green fins, which she decided was a bass. She took the fish home. It grew very big, very quickly. She named him Big B, bought a large aquarium, and kept him for four years, during which time woman and fish developed a surprisingly strong bond. “I would put my arms in the water and he would swim over and let me hold him,” she recalls. “Since he was there, I started doing drawings of him on the pots.”

Unfortunately, Big B died when Jennifer and Michael moved. She continues to adorn her pots with fish imagery, however, along with a range of other creatures, including birds, butterflies, dragonflies, and bats. Her designs have become increasingly naturalistic and detailed in recent years, thanks in part to her husband’s perceptive nature. Sitting in her booth at shows, Michael often quietly listens to visitors’ comments among themselves when they don’t know who he is. At one show a pair of collectors agreed they would prefer a certain pot if the designs were more intricate and covered more of the surface. Michael passed the comments on to his wife, who used the ideas as a creative challenge to move to another level with her art.

And then there are the cars. Standing on the stoop of their home, Moquino grins as she gestures to a souped-up silver Chevy Cavalier and a charcoal-colored Mustang GT parked out front. The Mustang is Michael’s and is waiting for Moquino to have time to super-charge the engine. Hers is the turbo-charged Cavalier, which her husband fondly calls the “Cavalari” (as in Ferrari) for its power and speed. “I even beat Mike in his Mustang,” she playfully boasts. Most of Moquino’s time these days, though, is spent on pottery. In coming months she hopes to explore new shapes in clay and new types of etched and painted imagery, including portraits of Pueblo people. “I’m constantly changing my designs,” she reflects. “I’ve got all kinds of ideas floating around in my head.”   

Santa Fe-based Gussie Fauntleroy also writes for Art & Antiques, New Mexico Magazine, Native Peoples, and the Santa Fean.