Signature traditions
Barro Negro
The black clay of San Bartolo Coyotepec. Its mirror finish comes entirely from hand-burnishing with a quartz stone — a secret carried for centuries by Zapotec families.
Oaxaca
Talavera Poblana
Majolica tin-glazed earthenware with a protected denomination of origin. Only 13 certified workshops in Puebla and Tlaxcala may carry the name. Each piece takes up to six months.
Puebla · Tlaxcala
Catrinas de Capula
Capula’s Purépecha artisans transformed Posada’s skeletal engraving into an exuberant ceramic form — hand-sculpted, layered with slip, and dressed in impossible detail. No two are the same face.
Michoacán
Alebrijes
The fantastical creatures of Arrazola and San Martín Tilcajete — carved from copal wood, then painted in intricate geometric patterns that can take weeks to complete. Each animal is part invention, part dream, born from a vision Pedro Linares had during a fever in 1936.
Oaxaca · CDMX
Huichol Nierika
Tiny glass beads pressed one by one into beeswax and resin, building up radiant mosaic surfaces dense with peyote visions and sacred geometry. For the Wixáritari people, each piece is a prayer made visible — not decoration, but communication with the divine.
Jalisco · Nayarit
Mata Ortiz
A village in the Chihuahuan desert that shouldn’t exist as a craft center — until Juan Quezada taught himself to replicate ancient Paquimé pottery from shards he found in the hills. Every pot is hand-coiled, hand-polished, fired in an open pit, and painted with a brush made from a single human hair.
Chihuahua
Lacquerware
Wood or gourd sealed with mineral paste and chia oil, then inlaid with pigment ground from insects, minerals, and earth. Uruapan and Olinalá each developed distinct styles centuries apart; both trace their techniques to pre-Hispanic origins that predate the Spanish arrival.
Guerrero · Michoacán
Otomí Tenango
Embroidery from the Tenango de Doria valley, where animals, plants, and mythological figures flow across white cloth in bold outline stitches. The style was developed in the 1960s as an economic lifeline after drought — and became one of Mexico’s most recognized textile exports within a generation.
Hidalgo
Papel Picado
Tissue paper or metallic foil, folded into layers and cut with chisels through dozens of sheets at once. San Salvador Huixcolotla produces most of Mexico’s supply, where families have refined the craft into compositions of extraordinary intricacy — some featuring hundreds of individual cut elements per banner.
Puebla · San Salvador
Tehuana Textiles
The ceremonial dress of the Isthmus Zapotec — velvet huipiles embroidered with flowers, lace headdresses worn as skirts during festivals. Frida Kahlo made the aesthetic internationally famous, but the women of Juchitán and Tehuantepec had been wearing it as an assertion of matriarchal identity for centuries before.
Oaxaca Isthmus
Hojalata
Tin plate cut, punched, and soldered into mirrors, niches, candleholders, and ornaments. Introduced by Spanish tinworkers in the colonial era, the craft was absorbed and transformed by Mexican artisans who layered it with Catholic iconography and pre-Hispanic motifs — sacred and domestic at once.
San Miguel · Oaxaca
Also in our collection
Backstrap Loom
One of the oldest weaving technologies in Mesoamerica, still in daily use across Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Yucatán. The loom is anchored to a tree or post at one end and to the weaver’s body at the other — tension controlled entirely by the spine. The patterns woven into huipiles and rebozos encode community identity, marital status, and cosmological belief.
Chiapas · Oaxaca · Yucatán
Palm Weaving
Tule and palm leaf stripped, dried, and plaited into sombreros, baskets, and petates by hand in the coastal communities of Guerrero and Oaxaca. The work is fast and deeply rhythmic — weavers work by feel without looking down — but a single fine sombrero can take three full days to complete.
Guerrero · Oaxaca
Dance Masks
Carved from copal, cedar, or pine and lacquered in vivid pigments, these masks are ritual objects before they are art objects. Each one is made for a specific dance — the Danza de los Diablos, the Moors and Christians, the Tiger Dance — and is considered to carry spiritual power during the performance. Many are burned or buried after use rather than sold.
Guerrero · Michoacán
Chaquira Beadwork
Closely related to Huichol nierika but distinct in form — tiny seed beads threaded on wire or stitched onto cloth and gourd to create sculptural figures, masks, and vessels. Where yarn paintings are flat and ceremonial, chaquira tends toward the three-dimensional and narrative, depicting jaguars, serpents, and the deer that carries the soul between worlds.
Jalisco · Nayarit