The Journey of Mayolica Pottery A Santa Fe Found lecture

Learn about the risky “Journey of Mayólica” pottery up El Camino Real to Santa Fe in a lecture by Robin Farwell Gavin at 2 pm Saturday, April 17, in the New Mexico History Museum Auditorium. The event is free with museum admission.

The lecture is part of the Santa Fe Found lecture series that supports Santa Fe Found: Fragments of Time, an exhibit at the Palace of the Governors exploring the roots of Santa Fe, this year celebrating its 400th anniversary. The exhibit uses historic documents, period paintings and archaeological artifacts to detail life in colonial Mexico and Spain’s far northern frontier. It includes sherds of blue-and-white mayólica pottery that once made up objects like an ink well, also on display. From its origins in medieval Spain, it endured first an ocean journey then an overland caravan to Santa Fe.

Besides tracing that journey, Gavin will look at the materials, techniques and styles of mayólica, as well as artists who still produce such work. Various styles of pottery from France, Italy, England and China influenced one another as well as the design and production of Pueblo pottery.

“Through one single sherd,” Gavin said, “we can explore the colonial world – the lives of the potters who made them, the places in which they were created, their uses in churches, conventos and homes, the importance they lent to social occasions.

“We can see the influence of Muslim art, of Italian Renaissance art, of Chinese porcelains brought to the Americas on the Manila galleons, and of the French rococo style, as well as Indian chintz fabrics and Staffordshire pottery. We can reconstruct the table settings of the 18th century from Spain to Mexico to New Mexico, and we can imagine the social situations in which these vessels were a symbol as well as a necessity.”

Gavin is chief curator for the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art and consulting curator of collections for El Rancho de las Golondrinas.  A Chicago native, she has been the lead curator for more than 20 exhibitions at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art and Museum of International Folk Art concerning the Spanish colonial arts of Mexico and New Mexico, and has written several articles, gallery guides, and books on the subject.

The next lecture supporting the Santa Fe Found exhibition will be at 6 pm, May 13, when Joseph Sánchez, director of UNM’s Spanish Colonial Research Center and director of the Petroglyph National Monument, speaks on “Peralta and the Founding of Santa Fe.

Funding for the Santa Fe Found exhibition and lecture series was made possible by the Palace Guard, a support group of the Museum of New Mexico Foundation; the Gala Opening Committee; Friends of Archaeology, a support group of the Museum of New Mexico Foundation; the Santa Fe 400th; and the Museum of New Mexico Foundation.