Dextra Quotskuyva

Dextra Quotskuyva Nampeyo (September 6, 1928 – February 2019) was a Native American potter and artist. She was in the fifth generation of a distinguished ancestral line of Hopi potters.

In 1994 Dextra Quotskuyva was proclaimed an "Arizona Living Treasure," and in 1998 she received the first Arizona State Museum Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2001, the Wheelwright Museum organized a 30-year retrospective exhibition of Quotskuyva's pottery, and in 2004, she received the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts Lifetime Achievement award.

Personal life Quotskuyva was the great-granddaughter of Hopi-Tewa potter Nampeyo of Hano, who revived Sikyátki style pottery, Her daughter, Hisi Nampeyo is also a potter, and her son, Dan Namingha, is painter and sculptor. Her husband, Edwin Quotskuyva, was a veteran and a Hopi tribal leader.

Quotskuyva died in February 2019, at the age of 90.

Work Dextra began her artistic career in 1967, following Nampeyo's rich heritage rooted in Sikyatki decorations.

Quotskuyva experiments with the traditional materials usually used for pottery, gathering clay from different sources from her reservation and creating variations on the characteristic orange, tan, and brown hues of Hopi bonfire pots. For the decorations, she uses bee-weed plant for the black and native clay slips for the red.

In describing her way of creating pottery, she said: "One day my pottery calls for me, and then I know this is the day I must do it".