The Renaissance of Mata Ortiz

How a Piece of Pottery Saved  the town of  Mata Ortiz in Chihuahua, Mexico

     Spencer MacCallum was a slender, well-educated  man who, for reasons I was never quite sure of, ended up in San Pedro as a night watchman at Angels Gate Cultural Center in its early days. You wouldn’t know it by looking at him in his crumpled hat and work clothes, but he had a degree in art history from Princeton and a masters of art in social anthropology from the University of Washington.

Clearly a very smart guy, who spoke with a slight stutter, as I recall, and came from a notable family. MacCallum and his grandfather founded the Science of Society Foundation, and in 1970 he published a booklet, The Art of Community, as well as his 2003 articles “The Enterprise of Community: Market Competition, Land, and Environment” and “Looking Back and Forward”.

MacCallum was a lecturer at the Independent Institute, an American libertarian think tank founded in 1986 by David J. Theroux, based in Oakland, California. Although by the time he landed in Pedro, he was mostly an itinerant garage sale hunter who on the weekends mapped out all of the advertised sales in this area and hit everyone of them before noon. He was always looking for something, but unlike many he didn’t seem to keep very much. He did, however, have an eye for anything that looked like antiquity.

So, as it happens… Spencer and I got to know each other because of his book, The Art of Community, which he, in his odd stuttering way, tried to explain to me until he just handed me a copy. In The Art of Community, MacCallum argues that the property relations in a community fundamentally determine the physical structure and dynamics of the community. This explains a lot about the current state of the San Pedro Arts District.

 I think it was Muriel Olguin who introduced us.

However, the strangest synchronicity was that when Suzanne and I went to Baja California for Christmas we ended up camping on a somewhat deserted beach south of Mulegé, south of Santa Rosalia. When we woke up in the morning we came upon a campfire of people, and lo, it was Spencer with his family cooking breakfast. They invited us to eat and we were hungry.

It was some time later when he told me about a strange discovery he made while traveling in New Mexico.

In his usual treasure hunting mode, he stopped at a secondhand store and came across a curious piece of pottery. It was curious because it looked like an imitation of the ancient Casas Grande pottery, but it clearly was not very old. In fact, it looked quite new, but finished with the same technique and design motifs of the ancient pottery Spencer knew about. In 1976, Spencer visited what he called “a junk shop” on the U.S.-Mexico border. He spotted some beautifully painted clay pots with no manufacturer marks or names. 

“I knew as soon as I saw the pots that whoever made them was someone special — someone who truly knew [himself or herself],” Spencer later recounted. All the junk shop owner knew about the pots was that they were sold by some people from Mexico.

 Like a detective, he followed the trail of the origin of this pot a hundred miles south of the border to find a dusty little adobe village of Mata Ortiz, in a wide, fertile valley long inhabited by indigenous people. There Spencer discovered the maker of this pot, Juan Quezada. The town didn’t have running water nor electricity, with just dirt roads and a few buildings inhabited by mostly family and relatives of Quezada. He was a very humble maker of pots but a real craftsman in the design of the discovered prehistoric pottery fragments from the ancient Paquimé (Casas Grandes) culture. 

 In Spencer’s broken stutter of Spanish, he got Juan’s story and then bought several of his pots with U.S. dollars. He returned to San Pedro satisfied that he had made a true anthropological discovery of a village sustained by the artistry of this one man. This in many ways fit into his philosophy of Art of Community thinking.

MacCallum brings Quezada to San Pedro

It was somewhere about 1986 that McCallum brought Quezada to San Pedro with his brothers to do a demonstration. The unique part of his craft was that he didn’t use a potter’s wheel to throw perfectly cylindrical ceramics — ­ they were hand-built. He would start by using a bowl, placing a handful of clay into it and forming it against the side. Then using coils of clay to build on top of this foundation, turning it slowly by hand. He kept this up until he reached the desired height, in the process smoothing out the side, turning it repeatedly. When he was done, you couldn’t tell this was a hand-built ceramic pot. I was amazed.

At this time Quezada was selling his pots for under $100 each, which for him was a great deal. Spencer continued to buy and in the beginning paid him $500 a month for three years and collected his works for the next 30 years, and gradually his reputation began to grow. He started to get international recognition and art buyers started to make the trip down to Mata Ortiz — his prices began to grow with the demand until the pots that once earned $65 were bringing $650 and then $7,500.

At this point all of Quezada’s family started making pottery, too, and it became the life blood of Mata Ortiz. It was a village collective enterprise and it was a true success. Now I’m not sure how much McCallum took credit for making this happen but it sure fits into his Art of Community philosophy as a proof of concept. Today it has been called the Renaissance of Mata Ortiz with Galería Juan Quezada, a showcase gallery in the home of the founding father of Mata Ortiz pottery.

     The pottery is now world famous and celebrated by the Mexican government and the story of McCallum’s discovery has become legend.

 Quezada taught his family and neighbors. Today, nearly 300 households and master artisans in Mata Ortiz create fine, signed ceramic art collected globally and displayed in major museums like the Smithsonian. There have been many shows in San Antonio, El Paso, California and other prominent museums throughout North America. There is even an Amazon documentary called The Renaissance of Mata Ortiz.

It has become a cultural tourism magnet for Pablo Carrillo, a second-generation guide with more than 30 years of experience in northern Mexico. He takes travelers on a four-day, three-night Mata Ortiz trip departing from Tucson and includes round-trip transportation, bed-and-breakfast accommodations, visits with local pottery artists and guided stops at Paquimé and Cueva de la Olla.

Before McCallum died he sold his collection of about 250 pieces of the pottery to the San Diego Museum of Man for a reported $1.2 million. This is a true testament to his legacy. 

 Spencer McCallum is most widely known for leading an economic and cultural transformation in the area surrounding the city of Casas Grandes in Chihuahua, Mexico. This regional renaissance has an unlikely source: hand-made pottery and Spencer’s totally unreasonable commitment to promoting it.

As reported by Alison DaRosa on Jan. 11, 2013, “Roads in the village itself remain unpaved. Here and there newer or enlarged homes stand beside century-old mud-brick adobes. Today most homes have indoor plumbing and electricity. Satellite dishes cling to rooftops.” And, “When I first visited, the village had two telephones. Today a few of the more prosperous potters have high-speed Internet, websites and Facebook pages. Most have phones; many have cellphones. Now the village has four schools — kindergarten through high school. Youngsters wear uniforms and huddle in computer labs. The high school opened a year ago. “Before the road was paved [in 2008], students traveled by van to school in Colonia Juárez — four hours a day to get to and from school,” says potter Diego Valles. “Now our kids can walk to school. My wife is off taking our oldest daughter to piano lessons.”

And this is what art can do for a poor community and create a true Renaissance!

Spencer McCallum died on Dec. 17, 2020 at the age of 88 in Casas Grandes, Mexico.

See our eulogy here: https://tinyurl.com/MacCallumeulogy