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All auctions / Porcelain & Pottery / Two Mexican Folk Art Ceramic 'Munecas' by Josefina Aguilar
Margarita Josefina Aguilar Alcantara (Mexican, 1945-2026). Two munecas. Painted red clay figurines, n.d. Each signed on interior of base. A pair of painted red-clay women kneel with their wares and wear their imaginations on their heads. The taller cradles a small girl in a red dress and clutches four white turnips with trailing greens; above her spreads a flowering tree hung with fruit, where Adam and Eve stand flanking the serpent coiled in the branches, an apple in Eve's hand. Her companion holds a split watermelon against a green rind, crowned by a mermaid strumming a guitar amid a crescent moon with a face, a swordfish, a spotted fish, a star, the sun, a leaf, and a shell. Both wear white blouses, hooped earrings, and long black braids, their skirts blocked in yellow and turquoise. Each is signed on the interior of the base. Josefina Aguilar (1945-2026) spent her life turning red clay into a record of village existence. Working from Ocotlan de Morelos in Oaxaca, she shaped small figures that stood in for whole communities: brides and mourners, butchers and street vendors, saints and skeletons sharing space on the same shelf. She learned the trade as a child, watching her mother work clay that had, until then, been credited to her father's hands. Her figures resist prettiness on purpose. Aguilar's Adam and Eve, her Last Supper, her grinning Day of the Dead musicians all carried the same unsentimental humor about mortality that she voiced herself: her people joked about death because the alternative was bitterness. The headdress format seen here, a load of produce transformed into a stage for biblical or marine fantasy, is among the most recognizable inventions of her workshop. Nelson Rockefeller's visit to the family's roadside stand in 1978 changed the scale of her recognition, though not her method. The proceeds let the family buy the very land their clay came from, ending years of paying by the week for it. Diabetes took her eyesight in 2014; she kept sculpting anyway, working entirely by touch while her children handled the paint. "It's not the eyes," she said, "it's the hands and the brain that matter." She died in Oaxaca City on February 13, 2026, at 80, survived by eight children (several of them artists in their own right, including her son Demetrio), thirty-six grandchildren, and three sisters who built their own reputations in clay alongside her. Item # 204303
Estimate:$200
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorPorcelain & Pottery
Estimate:
$200
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