The intersection between art and sciences: PBS's Craft in America episode highlights Santa Clara Pueblo brothers and artists

Joseph and Sergio Youngblood Lugo come from a long line of artists from Santa Clara Pueblo.

Each pueblo has a different style of pottery that they traditionally make, and it really is based on the type of clay that is in the surrounding area.

The intersection between art and sciences: PBS's Craft in America episode highlights Santa Clara Pueblo brothers and artists

The brothers are featured in the “Science” episode of the PBS series Craft in America, which will air at 9 p.m. Friday, Dec. 27, on New Mexico PBS, channel 5.1. It will also be available to stream on the PBS app.

The “Science” episode delves into discovering the beauty, significance and relevance of handmade objects and the artists who bring them to life.

It investigates the unexpected intersection between art and the sciences, spanning technology, engineering, biology, math and the climate emergency.

The episode begins at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Erik and Martin Demaine combine math with art. Erik Demaine is an MIT professor of computer science, and the father-son team takes inspiration from their research to create unique curved-crease origami sculptures from folded paper.

Then the series has a segment in Los Angeles where it profiles ceramic artist Joan Takayama-Ogawa at the Otis College of Art and Design, where she works in clay to respond to the ongoing climate emergency.

Producers then highlight Chris Maynard in Olympia, Washington, who creates intricate art entirely from bird feathers.

The episode ends with the Santa Clara Pueblo siblings, who are taking the helm with centuries old pottery procedures.

Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico has been home to a long tradition of Native potters.

The brothers demonstrate the ancestral firing technique that produces their unique polished pottery.

“I remember going to a museum when I was young and seeing pieces of pottery by my grandmother and my mother,” said Sergio Youngblood Lugo. “I remember my teacher asking me, ‘That’s your family?’”

New Mexico has a variety of clay and the style changes among each pueblo.

The brothers say that Santa Clara Pueblo pottery is thicker than most, which gives them room to carve out the pieces and play with color.

“(When we find) a pigmented stone, we pulverize it and put different colors together and that’s how you get different types of reds,” Joseph Youngblood Lugo said.

When the brothers build pots, they use what is called a puki, which is a premade bowl which helps mold the piece.

The brothers work by coiling clay on top of each other. They said there is a science to it.

“The process is dependent on the weather,” the brothers said. “You don’t want it to be humid because if your piece is too wet, it will collapse. It won’t be strong enough to hold its own weight. But if a piece dries out too much, the coil will crack. A lot of it is building off of experience.”

On Santa Clara, the people were farmers, so typically, the women made pottery.

Men might paint or design pieces, but they didn’t necessarily make pottery.

Pottery was meant for utility and for ceremony, but in the late 1800s when the railroads were developed, they would stop at every pueblo, and there would be people selling pottery.

About 50 years ago, the men began to make pottery as well.

Joseph Youngblood Lugo is known for his pieces being thoughtful and keeps Santa Clara Pueblo as the foundation of his pieces.

“I had my very first show when I was seven years old,” he said. “It wasn’t something that I really wanted to do. I took a break for a very long time. One day, I just fell in love with it again. It’s really cool to show people what you can create with your hands.”

Meanwhile, Sergio Youngblood Lugo is part of a younger generation of artists which takes traditional aspects of the work and brings it to the contemporary world.

“I created my own water serpent,” he said. “I wanted to make it more modern. I’ve always thought that polishing is the most technically difficult part. Everything that we do is the traditional method. We’re using my grandmother’s grandmother’s stone. Just knowing that it’s passed so many hands, it gives me a lot of confidence to do the same thing that they did.”