Legoria Tafoya's Santa Clara Pottery, Step by Step: Hand-Colored Photos From 1939

In the 1920s and 1930s the National Park Service (NPS) made education a central part of its mission, building museum exhibits across the country. Many featured Native American artifacts and history from lands that had become parks — often in ways that were culturally insensitive, paternalistic and racist. Yet many Native people, among them Legoria Tafoya of Santa Clara Pueblo, were hired to demonstrate their traditions or to make pottery, paintings, clothing and tools for the exhibits. Much of that work is now in NPS museum collections, where it is still studied and reconsidered as more voices join the conversation.

Legoria Tafoya, June 1939. NPS History Collection photo by Natt N. Dodge

Legoria Velarde Tafoya (1911–1984)

• Born on April 14, 1911, at K'apovi (Santa Clara Pueblo), New Mexico, eldest daughter of Herman and Marianita Chavarria Velarde. She and her sisters Rosita, Pablita and Lucaria ("Jane") all became gifted artists.
• Schooled at St. Catherine's Indian School in Santa Fe; married at 18 to Pasqual Tafoya, later a two-term governor of Santa Clara. They had five children; their daughter Celes became a celebrated potter who often worked with her mother.
• Learned pottery from her grandmother from 1930, starting with animal figures — lions, turtles, bears, birds — which she sold to tourists to help support the family.
• Won a blue ribbon at the Santa Fe Indian Market in 1940 for a plain polished bowl, and became known for carved blackware bowls, jars and candlesticks.
• Sold most of her work through Enchanted Mesa Indian Arts near Albuquerque, and was among the first Santa Clara artists whose work came with a biographical brochure.
• Her pottery is held by Bandelier National Monument, the National Museum of the American Indian, the University of Michigan Museum of Art and others, and by private collectors in the U.S., Germany, Ireland, England, Canada and Peru.
• She died in February 1984; Celes carried on with her own daughter, Evelyn Aguilar.

The 1939 photographs

In June 1939, Natt N. Dodge, junior naturalist for the NPS Southwestern National Monuments, filmed and photographed Tafoya at Santa Clara Pueblo for an exhibit at Bandelier. The monthly report noted he took "movie shots" of her gathering clay and shaping "some of her famous Santa Clara black jars," with stills for a museum case showing the stages of making a jar. Tafoya also made nine objects for Bandelier, from a raw ball of clay to a finished pot; they remain in Bandelier's collection.

Twelve of Dodge's photos are in the NPS History Collection — perhaps the only hand-colored versions. The colorists are unknown, but may have worked at the NPS Western Museum Laboratory in Berkeley, where artists, many of them women, tinted prints and lantern slides.

Making a Santa Clara pot

1. Dig the clay — from a spot her family had used for generations.

NPS History Collection photo by Natt N. Dodge

2. Break it up — crushing the big clumps.

NPS History Collection photo by Natt N. Dodge

3. Knead and temper — at Santa Clara, volcanic ash and other materials are worked in so the clay fires evenly without cracking.

NPS History Collection photo by Natt N. Dodge

4. Form the base — after resting overnight, a ball of clay is flattened into a disc; she used her fist to shape it.

NPS History Collection photo by Natt N. Dodge

5. Coil the walls — rolling clay into long, thin ropes and coiling them upward.

NPS History Collection photo by Natt N. Dodge

6. Scrape smooth — with rounded pieces of gourd.

NPS History Collection photo by Natt N. Dodge

7. Thin with a knife — scraping the walls down. Then the pot dries slowly, so it won't crack.

NPS History Collection photo by Natt N. Dodge

8. Burnish — rubbing with a polishing stone until the surface gleams. Note the animal figures and pots on her table.

NPS History Collection photo by Natt N. Dodge

9. Apply slip — a coat of fine liquid clay that becomes the canvas for the design.

NPS History Collection photo by Natt N. Dodge

NPS History Collection photo by Natt N. Dodge

10. Paint the design — with mineral paints and yucca brushes. Each pueblo has its own colored slips, designs and forms — and so does each potter.

The red shirt and tablecloth suggest a less practiced hand colored part of this print. NPS History Collection photo by Natt N. Dodge

11. Fire — outdoors, traditionally fueled with dried cow dung. The pot is red before firing; to turn it black, Tafoya smothered the fire with dried, powdered horse manure.

Legoria Tafoya demonstrates firing the pot in a smoking fire piled high with animal dung. (NPS History Collection photo by Natt N. Dodge, HFCA-00777)

Tafoya, her sister and the Park Service

No record shows how the NPS paid Tafoya for the shoot or the demonstration pots; she doesn't appear to have been an employee, and was more likely paid a flat fee or a day wage. She was probably recommended by her sister, Pablita Velarde, whom the NPS hired in 1939 to paint scenes of pueblo life for Bandelier's museum. Pablita's work was interrupted at the end of June, when her services "were terminated temporarily," and resumed only in November; working as funds allowed, she painted more than 70 pictures for the museum. Later reports mention Tafoya again only as a notable visitor.

Sources

Based on "50 Nifty Finds #29: Traditions in Clay," NPS History Collection, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Quotations are from the Southwestern Monuments monthly reports of 1939. Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26.