Juan Quezada Celado

Juan Quezada Celado (born May 6, 1940) is a Mexican potter known for the re-interpretation of Casas Grandes pottery known as Mata Ortiz pottery. Quezada is from a poor rural town in Chihuahua, who discovered and studied pre Hispanic pottery of the Mimbres and Casas Grandes cultures. He eventually worked out how the pots were made with no help from ceramicists or specialists in these cultures. Initial attempts to sell the pots in his area failed, but he did have success with border merchants. These brought the pottery to shops on the U.S. side of the border, where they were discovered by Spencer MacCallum, an anthropologist who tracked Quezada down and helped him break into the larger U.S. market. Quezada’s success in pottery sparked interest in the activity by others in the town and he responded by teaching family and friends. Today there are over 300 families who earn all or part of their income from the pottery. Quezada’s work has been displayed in museums in various countries and in 1999 he was awarded the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes. Despite this, his work is still relatively unknown in Mexico.

Juan Quezada Celado was born in the town of Tutuaca, in the municipality of Belisario Domínguez, Chihuahua. He moved to the town of Mata Ortíz when he was a baby, and grew up with little schooling, which he did not like. At that time, Mata Ortíz was only three blocks wide, and has been in decline economically since the Mexican Revolution.

Since childhood, he liked to work with his hand, trying to paint and sculpt with the few tools he had at age seven. He experimented with painting all kinds of surfaces such as wood, paper and even the walls of his house, filling those until his mother would make him clean them to start over again. This was noticed by the local government, which offered to send him to art school, but he refused. He believes that was a good decision.

When he was younger, he also boxed, with his friend Pino Molina as manager. Although he says he never lost a fight, he gave it up because his mother was worried.

As a teenager, he quit school to start earning money to help his family. At age fourteen, he began to collect firewood in the mountains and then worked for the railroad and collected maguey cactus. These jobs had him spend long stretches in the surrounding mountains, where he found pre Hispanic pots and pot shards from the Mimbres and Casas Grandes cultures in caves and other places. He collected these to examine, impressed by their artistic quality.

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