Oaxaca is known for its pottery. There’s the classic black clay pottery produced in San Bartolo Coyotepec, and the iconic green glazed pottery of Santa María Atzompa, among others. But like every other art form native to Oaxaca, from rug weaving to alebrijes, there are modernists at play, taking traditional techniques and updating them with a contemporary perspective.

Our favorite example of this in Oaxacan pottery is the work of Mateo Hernández and his studio, Alfarería Rufi. We first came across his work on our visit to Oaxaca in 2019. Alfarería Rufi had a stall in the Christmas artisan’s popup, and we came home with four beautiful tumblers that became an everyday part of our lives. They were back at the same popup this Christmas and I picked up a shot glass. What better way to enjoy Mezcal than in a Oaxacan shot glass?

As it turns out, their studio is just 10 minutes north of Oaxaca de Juarez, in Santa Rosa. We’d only seen bits and pieces of the work, in the Christmas popups and in scattered shops around town, and were looking forward to seeing the full spectrum of shapes and colors, so we arranged a tour. We have an endless appetite for factory and production tours. I’d tour a toilet seat factory. I love seeing how things are made.

What surprised us on the tour was the complexity of their process. The pieces are beautiful, but we didn’t understand that they’re beautiful because they’re hard. Mateo has been perfecting his craft for over fifty years, and the depth of his knowledge is clearly what allows these pieces to exist at all. It’s especially clear in the shops in town, as several other potters have tried to copy his two-color signature look without replicating his technique. The results are, frankly, crude in comparison.

It starts, as it should, with the clay, which is locally sourced from their neighborhood. Santa Rosa is hard by Santa María Atzompa, which is famous for the red clay used for their traditional green pottery.

Each piece is hand thrown on a wheel by a potter trained by Mateo personally. The potter in the pictures below has been there two years to work up to cups. The young lady who guided us through the studio (until Mateo joined us to add his perspective) had only been there a year, so she was only trained for plates, a much simpler shape.

The scraps you see around the wheel below all get recycled, by the way, as do any pieces that aren’t quite up to snuff. Those get tossed into buckets of water to be slaked (melted) back into clay and reworked. They pride themselves on being completely sustainable.

The next step is air drying. Each piece sits on an open air shelf to cure in preparation for the first application of pigment, after which it will be buffed and fired.

The next part is where the magic happens. Each piece has a lead-free enamel glaze carefully painted on the inside and is fired a second time. The pigment on the outside kisses the lip of each piece with the high gloss porcelainized enamel on the interior. The combination of the contrast in textures and colors on inside and outside, created by the double firing process and the precise application of the interior glaze, is what gives Mateo’s work its distinctive look.

But our pottery adventures, or misadventures, weren’t over after our tour of Alfarería Rufi. We’d been to a shop in town, Andares del Arte Popular, which features art that perfectly represents the intersection of tradition and innovation that’s our sweet spot. Honestly, we could have closed our eyes and randomly picked anything there and left winners. Of course they carried work from Alfarería Rufi, but what I bought was a tiny, delicate mezcal cup with an inside glaze that looks like fireworks. Not unlike the effect of the mezcal itself.

We’d failed to ask where the cup had come from, but we were able to identify the maker by searching the Andares site: Taller Artesanal Pitao Copycha, in Santa María Atzompa.

This would not be our first visit to Santa María Atzompa. We’d found a list of all of the market days for the villages around Oaxaca, and Santa María Atzompa’s was the day after our visit to Hierve el Agua, when we still had the car. As it turns out, either our intel was incorrect or we could never locate the central mercado. Despite our failure, we decided to give Atzompa one more chance.

Finding Pitao Copycha wasn’t hard from the GPS perspective. But from the common sense perspective, we couldn’t possibly have been going the right way. Our taxi took us up into the hills, onto multiple dirt roads, and far away from anything that looked like commerce. We finally turned a dirt road corner and beheld a workroom whose exterior was heavily decorated with pottery, with a sign that identified it as Pitao Copycha. We’d found it!

Given that we were far away from anything, we asked our taxi to wait while we toured the studio and shopped. When we entered we found a space crowded with both work and workers. There were multiple rooms with shelves full of pottery, and at least a dozen people working on different pieces at long, common tables.

What we didn’t find was anything that looked even vaguely like my mezcal cup. The shapes were less refined and the glazes less sparkly and more natural. There was nothing wrong with it, per se, but we couldn’t figure out how the studio that made my cup had nothing like it in their workroom.

We left after a few minutes, which I’m sure baffled them. No one walks in there by accident. I doubt honestly that many people show up at all. So to go to the trouble to get there and then just walk out a few minutes after arriving must have seemed… like typically crazy gringo behavior.

We made it back home safely, and went back to Andares to ask where the cup had come from. Not Pitao Copycha, as it turns out. We’d gotten it wrong. Instead it was made by a potter named Isabel Refugio, a member of the famous Martínez Alarzón family of craftsmen.

In Santa María Atzompa.

But we’d vowed never to return to Atzompa. The city clearly didn’t care for us. We wouldn’t risk a third failure.

But we were able to take a virtual tour of their studio, thanks to the Nomad Cook Youtube channel. Here you go.