Tonita Peña and the Politics of Pueblo Art

During the early twentieth century, several artists from Pueblo communities in New Mexico and Hopi in Arizona took up watercolor painting, using the new (to them) medium to produce largely representational scenes of community activities. Cochiti Pueblo artist Tonita Peña was the only woman in this group, necessitating her navigation of gender as well as racial stereotypes. Peña was expected to produce the abstracted imagery seen on Pueblo pottery, a visual style and an art form long coded as women’s work. Using a series of images in which Peña depicts women making Pueblo pottery as an interpretive linchpin, this article argues that these scenes foreground the care Peña took to avoid inappropriate revelations of Pueblo sacred knowledge. Moreover, they evince an epistemological celebration of a practice considered women’s work even as she pictorialized it in a medium and style deemed inappropriate for her gender.