Mexican masters of the medium: Mexico's ancient civilizations serve as inspiration for a wide gamut of artistic creations, from elegant clay pots to witty glass and mixed-media assemblages.

• Author: Sorrentino, Joseph

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Mata Ortiz must be one of the least pretentious famous villages in Mexico, if not the world. The village is known worldwide for its pottery, which is prized for its craftsmanship and the beautiful intricacy of its designs. Pots made by the village's master potters fetch as much as US$15,000 and are in the collections of a number of museums, including the Smithsonian. Yet the village has no paved roads, houses are mostly simple unpainted adobe brick, and the residents are unfailingly kind and generous. It's almost as if they don't know how famous they are.

How such a humble village came to be so renowned for its pottery is an interesting story, and one that's impossible to tell without mentioning the ancient civilization known as Paquime, whose pots served as the model for modern Mata Ortiz pottery. One would also have to talk about the painstaking rediscovery of ancient pottery techniques and the two men primarily responsible for bringing Mata Ortiz to the world's attention: Juan Quezada and Spencer MacCallum. The story goes something like this:

The Paquime civilization had once flourished across northern Mexico and parts of the southwestern United States. One major Paquime site about twenty miles north of Mata Ortiz was abandoned sometime before 1450 after being attacked and burned. Spaniards renamed the site Casas Grandes (Big Houses) for the multi-leveled dwellings the civilization was known for. That is still the name of the quaint village near the ruins. One of the legacies of the Paquime civilization is the beautifully made and exquisitely decorated pots that are still occasionally found in the area. Finding an intact pot is rare now, but the hills surrounding nearby villages are filled with pottery shards, and those shards captured the interest of Juan Quezada over fifty years ago.

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When he was a boy, Quezada would find pieces of pottery as he scoured the hills for firewood. Innately inquisitive and possessing an artistic nature, he began studying them, noting how different pieces were made from different clays and how they were covered with intricate patterns. One day, Quezada came across an undisturbed Paquime burial cave containing, among other things, three intact pots. So taken was he with their beauty that he vowed to recreate the pots; no easy task since there was no information about how the pottery was made. Quezada needed to figure out where to find the clays, devise a way to...