Lydia Quezada and Rito Talavera

Mata Ortiz

Lydia Quezada is the youngest sister of Juan Quezada and she learned the art of making pottery from him. She taught her husband, Rito Talavera, to make pots, too, and has been teaching her children.

Lydia was producing black-on-black pottery early in her career, then moved to polished and matte black surfaces, then to a three-black design process. Then she moved to making large ollas of black and cream polychromes. Rito's general pieces tend to be stone-polished blackware with sculptural forms of turtles, lizards and snakes added to the rims and the upper sides of his ollas.