Kathleen Vanesian has been collecting ceramics from all over Mexico for 45 years. The retired collector and art critic has traveled all over the country finding particular pieces from certain artists from sometimes remote communities, amassing an incredible and varied collection of pottery that packs her Phoenix home.
But today, the landscape has changed in Mexico, where many younger people have traded jobs working to harvest large-scale monocultures like avocados or strawberries. And ceramics, once the lifeblood of these communities, has begun to diminish.
The New York Times documented the phenomenon recently in the Mexican state of Michoacán.
To Vanesian, it’s a loss of not just art, but culture. She stopped by KJZZ's studios to talk about what drew her to this kind of art.
Full conversation
KATHLEEN VANESIAN: I think as a kid, I was born and raised in San Diego, about a 15-minute drive from the Mexican border. And so Mexico was always on my radar. It was a part of my cultural landscape. My parents, when people would come into town, they would take their visitors to Tijuana. And at that time, you still actually could get a lot of interesting things in Tijuana. So that’s probably where it started.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, so something you’ve kind of always been aware of and liked.
VANESIAN: Exactly.
GILGER: So you’ve been doing this collecting for a lot of years. And it sounds like it has taken you all over Mexico to do it.
VANESIAN: It has. It has.
GILGER: Talk a little bit about the places you’ve traveled to find some of the pieces in your collection.
VANESIAN: Well, I’ve been to probably 15 or 20 of the different Mexican states. Michoacán, Jalisco, Guanajuato is a big ceramics place. And it’s not just ceramics that I collect. It’s other types of folk art, too. Sculptures in wood, textiles, all sorts of things, whatever I like. Whatever I like. Whatever appeals to me.
GILGER: What are some of your favorites in that?
VANESIAN: Let’s see. I love the pottery of Tzintzuntzan, which is a very simple, it has a cream background, a cream glaze, and then different designs usually related to fishing on the lake, like the butterfly nets of Lake Pátzcuaro where they they catch whitefish. But there are all sorts of forms of ceramics coming from there.
GILGER: Let me ask you this because one of the things that I think you’re getting at here with talking about the the way that each village has its own distinct type of pottery, right, is that the pottery, this kind of folk art tradition from this country, but really from anywhere, says a lot about the place and its history, right?
VANESIAN: Exactly. Exactly. This goes back to pre-Columbian times. This is not something that came with the Spanish conquest. This this goes way, way, way back. For example, in Jalisco, the town of Tonalá goes back 3,000 years.
GILGER: Wow.
VANESIAN: And their pottery tradition.
GILGER: Right. So these are traditions that are passed from family to family for not just generations, but it sounds like sometimes millennia.
VANESIAN: Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. And then new forms crop up like the devil statues from Ocumicho, Michoacán.
GILGER: OK. So you’ve surrounded yourself with this in your home. You clearly love this type of work and have traveled to collect it throughout your life. I want to ask you about the state of the industry today.
As we saw in this recent piece from The New York Times, there’s intense pressures on a lot of these regions kind of driven by industrial agriculture, cash crops, avocados, strawberries, things like that that are sort of drawing young people away from these traditional trades and into fields where they can, you know, make a reliable paycheck essentially, pull people out of poverty.
And, you know, it sounds like it’s a very nuanced situation where there’s good and bad on both sides. But what was your reaction to this?
VANESIAN: Well, actually, that whole change started to occur in the early ’90s.
GILGER: So you’ve seen this happen.
VANESIAN: I’ve seen this happen, and that’s with the introduction of NAFTA, where a lot of people from the different towns and villages would go up to the border to, you know, Arizona, California, wherever there was a maquiladora.
GILGER: Right. So when NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, passed in the early ’90s, this fundamentally changed the economy there.
VANESIAN: It sure did.
GILGER: That’s interesting. So how much of that do you think has to do with those kind of broader economic changes that have come to that country and to those regions?
VANESIAN: I’m sure it has everything to do with that. And that agribusiness now is astounding.
GILGER: So what do you think that’s doing or has done already to these kind of beautiful pieces, the long history of ceramics that you have collected for so long in Mexico?
VANESIAN: They’re being gentrified. You know, slick designs, oh and those horrible colors that you will now see coming out of Guanajuato, Dolores Hidalgo, Guanajuato, purple and neon orange and lime green, those are not traditional colors. And then of course, everyone’s madly in love with Frida Kahlo, so.
GILGER: Yes.
VANESIAN: If I ever see another Frida Kahlo image, The only Frida Kahlo image that I actually have in my collection, it’s a series of little sculptures by Josefina Aguilar from Ocotlán, Oaxaca. And she has taken imagery from the photographs and made little sculptures and painted them.
GILGER: So you think that the the industry is changing because of all of these kind of various factors. Can you still find those kinds of really original pieces that you would go and seek out back in the day?
VANESIAN: Yes, you can. You can.
GILGER: How do you do it?
VANESIAN: Find out where and when the concursos are, the big fairs. Also, there are holiday fairs where people will bring their stuff in to a big fair market, and you still can get great stuff.
GILGER: So let me ask you lastly, Kathleen, just about I guess why you love this. Like why you’ve spent so much time and energy tracking down these pieces and caring about this industry and watching sort of the up and downs and the changes of it. What is really special about it to you?
VANESIAN: I just love the the honesty. The people who create these things are going to create them whether people buy their pieces or not. They will come in from a day in the fields, and they will come and work their magic. And nothing’s thought they’re going to do it, no matter what. It won’t matter whether NAFTA is involved or industrialization or anything like that.
GILGER: Yeah, all of those things.
VANESIAN: All of those things.
GILGER: Yeah. All right. Well, you’ve surrounded yourself with it. That’s pretty cool. Kathleen Vanesian, a retired collector and art critic, joining us to talk about Mexican pottery. Kathleen, thank you so much for coming in, I really appreciate it.
VANESIAN: Thank you for having me.
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