“Chris, what sounds good for dinner?”Silence.

It was February 2019. Chris Youngblood and Jennifer Tafoya were staying with us before their two-person show at King Galleries in Scottsdale, Arizona. I turned toward him. He was deep in thought, eyes fixed on the dining room table.

Three Santa Clara Pueblo water jars sat in front of him. Each one outstanding. Together, breathtaking. 

Chris Youngblood (Santa Clara Pueblo), Prayers for Rain, native clay and White Buffalo turquoise, traditionally fired, 13” 

 

The first, from the 1920s, was made by his great-great-grandmother, Sara Fina Tafoya—the matriarch. Broad and bold, it was a piece that defined an era. Next to it, a 17-inch double-shouldered jar by his great-grandmother, Margaret Tafoya—flawless, iconic. And beside that, a towering piece, sharply carved to perfection by his uncle, Nathan Youngblood.

“Chris?”

He blinked. “I’m sitting here in front of 100 years of some of my family’s best work. Just thinking…What would I have to make to earn my place at this table?”

It was a question about pottery, to be sure. But it was deeper than that. It was a question about belonging.

“Something significant,” I said. “You’re your own toughest critic. What do you think it would take? Let’s discuss it over dinner.”

This lit the fuse for a years-long journey, one marked by pressure, setbacks, growth and grit. Chris wasn’t just making pottery, he was carving out identity.

“My earliest memories of working with clay,” Chris says, “was not about the clay. It was having my preschool and elementary school art teachers always asking me to get my mom to come in and demonstrate in their class. They weren’t asking other kids that. That’s when I realized my family was different.”

His mom is Nancy Youngblood, one of the most celebrated Native potters alive. She won Best of Show at Santa Fe Indian Market the year Chris was born. Her works, exhibited in the world’s finest museums, have served as the standard of excellence in Native American pottery for all of Chris’ life.

Left: Chris Youngblood works on the pot by hallowing it out and thinning the walls at his kitchen table at the Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico.

Right: The pot sits in a metal cage as a fire begins to burn beneath it. The piece is ready to be fired.

 

Jennifer Tafoya, left, and Chris Youngblood place wood next to the cage containing the unfired pot. The goal is to get even and consistent heat around the pot.

 

“People ask what it was like growing up with her. And usually, it’s in the context of her pottery. She’s a great mom. Pottery is what she does. Not who she is. She’s a really great mom.”

Nancy raised Chris and his brothers, Sergio Lugo and Joseph Youngblood Lugo, as a single mother. “Pottery was her work,” Chris points out, “It wasn’t like we would just sit around with her playing with clay. It was all very serious.” 

Chris recalls making his first pot at age 12. “Mom was a great teacher. She let me make mistakes but was always very supportive, always showing me how to work with the clay and guide me through the process. It’s not the way she was taught,” he says. “Back when she was a little girl, everyone wanted to be a potter. The family wouldn’t really pay attention to you until you proved you were serious about it. Mom would tell me that her mom would look at something she made and say, ‘That’s pretty good, why don’t you walk down to grandmother’s and show her.’ So, she would. And my great-grandmother would say something like, ‘That’s nice but you can do that part better. Why don’t you redo that.’ Mom would do it again and then walk back to her grandmother and get more feedback. Once they figured out she was serious then they started to actually show her some things. That’s tough. A tough way to learn. But it was that experience that made her the stickler for details you see represented in her work today. Mom learned all the techniques through trial and error. She took the time to teach me and my brothers, so we learned the right way from the beginning. We’ve had to figure some things out on our own, and we are still learning but Mom’s help certainly sped up our development as potters. Serge, Joe and I all feel pretty lucky.”

He entered his first Santa Fe Indian Market at 13 and won Best of Youth by 17. This was his first significant step into the legacy of Santa Clara Pueblo pottery.  

Back at the table in 2019, the question still echoed. “What would I have to make?”

He remembered the 2014 Santa Fe Indian Market. He was 23. His mom and Dominique Toya were collaborating, hoping to win Best of Pottery. Chris, half-joking, said he’d beat them. But secretly, he just wanted to win a special award that was named in honor his great-grandmother: the Margaret Tafoya Memorial Award.

 

 

Chris Youngblood, left, and Nancy Youngblood add wood to a raging fire around the pot during the firing process. The fire can hover around 1,800 degrees.

 

Left: The fire is smothered with shredded manure that oxidizes the pot as it burns. This is the method that turns the pot black. The process is hot and smells quite potent, but it’s a process that produces that rich black color on a pot.

Right: Chris Youngblood dumps shredded manure on top of the cage containing his pot and the raging fire.

 

Margaret Tafoya was known for her large pottery. To qualify, Chris had to create a piece at least 15 inches tall. He built a 16-inch oblong vase carved with koi swimming through rippling water—memories from their childhood pond.

He polished it for weeks. When he submitted it, he learned the award had been discontinued. Deeply disappointed, he entered the piece for judging.

That Thursday, he got the call. He had won Best of Pottery. The win was a turning point—finding himself no longer in the shadow of his mother, but in her shared light. Charles King, in his book Spoken Through Clay, categorized Chris as one of pueblo pottery’s modernists when he wrote, “Christopher Youngblood comes to the clay focused on expanding the technical and artistic boundaries of his illustrious family…His manipulation of the clay surface through his technically inspired imagery expands the art in a new direction.”  

Twelve years later, that winning koi jar provided the design spark for his next goal: to earn a place at the table. An oblong shape would be perfect for the design he envisioned. The Clay Mother, however, had other ideas.

He built the new jar—same shape, but with a uniquely complex design. He poured himself into it. Two-hundred hours of work. Then, it cracked. Not just cosmetic—fatal.

“It’s hard to describe,” he says. “I wanted this to be the best piece I’d ever done. I’m holding this beautiful, broken thing, and every hour of the work I put into it flashes through my mind. I was sick. Just sick.”

It was the kind of loss that makes some artists walk away.

In pueblo tradition, pottery is more than craft—it’s spirit. Potters begin by offering a prayer to the Clay Mother, entering into quiet communion with the earth itself. The clay carries wisdom and memory. This dialogue between the potter and Mother Clay is not unlike the echoes of voices from ancestors who once shaped and fired these same forms.

“After the crack I needed time off,” Chris explains. “But I also felt like it was a lesson. A lesson that Mother Clay was teaching me. I needed to be humbler. More thoughtful rather than just trying to get it done.”

He paused. “I put too much of my own energy into it. Too many expectations, like, ‘This is going to be awesome’ rather than just focusing on the process. I let my ego get into the piece and then the piece wasn’t about the piece, it was about me. I was manhandling it. Forcing it to be what I wanted instead of letting it grow into what it needed to be.”

Once the fire is smothered, the waiting game begins. Chris Youngblood waits on a couch for roughly 60 minutes as the pot fires. At this point, he has no clear picture of the state of the pot—whether it’s perfectly fired or cracked from the heat.

 

As the fire is cleared, a fired pot emerges from the smoke. This is the moment a potter knows if the firing was successful or not.

 

“At a certain point,” he continues, “you can do all you can to a piece, but it’s going to be what it wants to be. The piece is its own living thing. You guide it, but like herding sheep, you’re not in full control.”

He tried again. “My next attempt was a little different but was basically the same oblong shape,” Chris notes. “And it cracks again.” This one came early. Less devastating but disheartening enough to put his tools away. “I needed a break. This time it was longer. I thought about starting again but I just didn’t get to it. It was too easy to let other things take priority.” Time passed. A lot of time.

Then one day, an epiphany.

“I realized I wasn’t supposed to make an oblong jar. The Clay Mother wanted me to make a water jar. As soon as I started forming that shape, it just worked. No issues. It wanted to be that shape. I knew then we were in a good place.”

My phone rings. It’s Chris. He sounds excited. 

“We are ready,” Chris says. “Come out to Santa Clara and see the firing.”

Traditional pueblo firings are communal, family processes, with each person playing a role. On this day, the two most important people to Chris were there: Jennifer and Nancy. They were there to not only to help with the work but to share in the joy of his accomplishment. It was an honor to be included. 

The rim of the pot showing the top portion, which has had a slip applied, and the raw clay on the bottom.

 

The finished pot showing the finished texture and color. 

 

“Firing is where most of the risk is in making pottery the traditional way,” Chris says. “A lot of great pieces have been lost in the fire. People ask if I get nervous, and for the first 15 years, I couldn’t even talk during firings. But this time, I just knew. This piece had changed me. I had learned from it. It was ready.”

My wife and I were humbled to share this experience with Chris, Jennifer and Nancy. Each cloud of smoke, each crackle of the fire, seemed to resonate with a promise: that even in the face of uncertainty, there lay the possibility of something beautiful. Something extraordinary. 

It wasn’t just a firing. It was a transformation. 

We could feel Chris take it all in. From the demanding monitoring process of subjecting the clay to the 1,800-degree fire, to the tense waiting during the long suffocating manure oxidation process that turns the piece black. The atmosphere of gratitude was palpable, not just for the clay or the fire, but for the very act of creation itself. His joy of giving birth to the dream, his fear of loss and the profound connection to his heritage merged together. Coalescing into a singular truth: that every piece of pottery, like human life, is a testament to the beauty of impermanence, a fleeting moment of artistry in the grand narrative of existence.

An inlaid stone of White Buffalo turquoise features prominently in the side of Chris Youngblood’s finished pot. 

 

The legend and stories of the pueblo people are told in their art and designed into their pottery. Elegantly interjecting the interplay of water, earth and sky, Chris’ water jar combined traditional symbolic imagery with modern design elements. A flared neck inspired by his great-great-grandmother, Sara Fina—a crown of polished flutes cascading like clouds. Below that, sharply angled oval medallions carved within the inward curvature of the neck represents falling rain. The polish: exquisite and nearly impossible at those angles. Light bounces from the curves like a reflection off black mirrored glass.

Both the top and mid-section of the piece fluidly incorporate stylized, modernistic design. At the foundational base of the water jar, however, carved to float above and around the mica-slipped matte finish, are two massive Avanyu water serpents. Their eyes, inlaid with White Buffalo stone—a feature previously not seen in pueblo pottery. The white stone with black matrix create an unwavering gaze. Their massive heads with lightning tongues add a sense of mystique to their formidable presence on the piece. The Avanyu’s authoritative size creates a captivating narrative symbolizing strength and harmony as they awaken the clouds above, bringing water down to the pueblo people. Taken together, the water jar tells the story of answered prayers for rain and renewal.

Chris has created a masterpiece.

“I couldn’t be more pleased with the way this came out,” Chris says to me. “The family’s approach to pottery, going back to Sara Fina, has always been to make better pottery today than yesterday, every day. Sometimes we do. Sometimes we fall short. But this is always our goal. With this piece I accomplished it. I’m especially happy with the polishing. It’s the best polishing I’ve ever done.”

“Every time I touch the clay, I learn something new,” he says. “I spent countless hours just polishing. A younger version of me would’ve said, ‘That’s good enough.’ But not this time. I had a specific intention. The polished section was either excellent or I sanded it down and started again. I think I redid the Avanyus three times. This piece taught me to never settle.” He smiles, “Good enough will never be good enough ever again.”

Chris Youngblood’s pot, far right, sharing a table with pieces by Sara Fina Tafoya, ca. 1920; Nathan Youngblood, ca. 2015; and Margaret Tafoya, ca. 1960.

 

“There are a lot of great polishers out there,” Chris adds. “I think Mom is the best. She and Russell Sanchez—those two are at the top. I’m not at their level yet, but with this piece and what I’ve learned from it, I’m getting closer.” 

Chris Youngblood’s spectacular water jar isn’t just a technical achievement, it’s a spiritual one. It represents a confluence of family legacy, artistic mastery and personal discovery. Through it, Chris reaffirms the enduring strength of cultural transmission, the unbroken thread that links past to present, and the way identity can be shaped not only by what we inherit, but by what we choose to create.

In seeking his place at the table, Chris found something more profound: a voice that honors tradition while daring to evolve it. His work doesn’t merely echo his Tafoya ancestry—it speaks with them. And in that dialogue, a new generation rises—not in the shadow of greatness, but walking alongside it. —

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