Josefina Aguilar Oaxacan Folk Art Figural Group - Seated Couple with Baby

Margarita Josefina Aguilar Alcantara (Mexican, 1945-2026) Couple with baby. Painted pottery sculpture, n.d. Signed on verso. A young family in red Oaxacan clay: a mustachioed man in a violet shirt and rose trousers holds a naked infant out at arm's length before him, while his companion leans in from the right, her right arm propped behind his head and shoulders, her left hand resting on her lap. She wears a white blouse embroidered at the neckline with scattered flowers, a full green skirt, and long yellow earrings; both sit barefoot on a plain cream-glazed bench. Modeled by hand from local clay, burnished, and painted in flat acrylic color, the group belongs to the figural tradition Josefina Aguilar built at Ocotlan de Morelos, where whole villages of brides, vendors, and saints were reduced to squat, wide-eyed clay bodies. Signed on the reverse. About the artist: 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. A gallery owner who knew her for four decades put it plainly: the work endured because it was unvarnished, not because it flattered. 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. Nelson Rockefeller's visit to her 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 # 204308

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