Josefina Aguilar Alcantara, a leading Mexican folk artist who sculpted evocative clay figurines depicting everyday life in her village — portraying people as varied as wedding guests and prostitutes — and who continued to work for more than a decade after losing her eyesight, died on Feb. 13 in Oaxaca City, Mexico. She was 80.
Her death, which was not widely reported at the time, was in a hospital, from complications of diabetes and sepsis, according to her son Demetrio Garcia Aguilar.
The Mexican Museum in San Francisco, a Smithsonian affiliate that exhibits works by Ms. Aguilar and her three sisters, also folk artists, described her in a tribute as “la maestra,” the teacher, to her extended family of artisans and “a pioneer who kept the cultural heartbeat of Oaxaca alive in clay.”
Using red clay and acrylic house paint, Ms. Aguilar, whose work was championed by Nelson A. Rockefeller, would sit in the courtyard of her studio in her rural village and fashion depictions of gatherings at baptisms, weddings and funerals, as well as figures engaged in more solitary pursuits: people taking showers, for example, and prostitutes standing under streetlights.
“They’re almost like reports on community rituals,” Kristopher Driggers, the curator of Latin American art at the San Antonio Museum of Art, which also exhibits her work, said in an interview.
Some of Ms. Aguilar’s sculptures had religious themes. She created Nativity scenes and a fig-leafed Adam and Eve standing in the Garden of Eden with Satan peering out from a tree. She rendered the Last Supper, with the mouths of some disciples agape as Jesus says he will be betrayed. She created figures of smiling, skeletal musicians, to be placed on home altars for Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, to honor and celebrate deceased loved ones.
“Our life is hard,” Ms. Aguilar told Lenore Hoag Mulryan for the 1982 book “Mexican Figural Ceramists and Their Works, 1950-1981.” “The days are long. God takes many. We do not fear death; we joke about it. We play with it. We have to do this or become bitter.”
Her figurines could be whimsical, too; prominent noses became a playful touch. She also sculpted dolls of renowned people, creating her own take on the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s “Self-Portrait with Monkey” series.
“What was amazing about Josefina’s pieces is that they weren’t cute — they were really strong, independent pieces of folk art that your eye never got tired of,” Hank Lee, the owner of the San Angel Folk Art gallery in San Antonio, who knew Ms. Aguilar for 40 years, said in an interview.
“They were so full of personality,” he added. “She would have butchers selling tripe, chicken vendors. They were done in basic colors, never overdone.”
Margarita Josefina Aguilar Alcantara was born on Feb. 22, 1945, in Ocotlán de Morelos, a town in the southern state of Oaxaca, where she continued to live. Her parents were farmers, but her mother, Isaura Alcantara Diaz, also made utilitarian pottery like stew pots, and her father, Jesus Aguilar Revilla, painted and made woven figures of turkeys from straw.
According to Tulane University, which has exhibited artwork by the Aguilar family, Isaura Alcantara’s work was initially credited to her husband. Josefina told Ms. Hoag Mulryan that she had learned her art by imitating her parents. She created her first Nativity scene at age 6.
With tourism increasing in Oaxaca, the family began making popular decorative ceramics to sell. As her work matured, Josefina made bells painted with animal heads, scenes of daily life and mermaids. She told Ms. Hoag Mulryan that she grew interested in folk art before her sisters Guillermina, Irene and Concepción did, but each became celebrated for her own distinctive style.
In 1977, Josefina won a national prize for popular art. She received widespread attention after Mr. Rockefeller, the former New York governor and vice president and a passionate collector of Mexican folk art, visited her home in 1978 and bought some cracked and faded but expressive figurines that had been set along a picket fence to advertise the Aguilar family business.
“You couldn’t help but be really struck by how unusual these pieces were,” Annie O’Neill, who was the curator of Mr. Rockefeller’s Mexican folk art collection and who accompanied him on the trip, said in an interview. “They had wonderful faces and portrayed regional costumes. It was different from anything anyone else was doing.”
While Mr. Rockefeller did not buy all the available figurines, as some accounts have suggested, his patronage did allow the Aguilar family to buy the land that was the source of their clay, according to the Mexican Museum.
In addition to museum exhibits, Ms. Aguilar was featured in a children’s book, “Josefina” (1996), by Jeanette Winter.
In 2014, untreated diabetes caused Ms. Aguilar to lose her vision, according to the Mexican Museum. She continued to sculpt her pieces by touch, with her family painting the figurines.
When the Covid epidemic struck, the family business suffered, Ms. Aguilar told Alan Eliot Goldberg, a collector of her work from New Canaan, Conn., who raised money for her medical treatment and included her in a book, “Oaxacan Folk Art: Response to Covid-19” (2021).
“We are not sick with Covid-19,” she told Mr. Goldberg, “but sick with hunger, as no one comes around anymore to buy from us.”
In addition to her son Demetrio, who is also a folk artist, Ms. Aguilar is survived by seven other children, most of them also artists — a daughter, Leticia Garcia Aguilar, and six sons, Rodrigo, Roberto, José Juan, Sergio, Fernando and Martin García Aguilar; 36 grandchildren; and her three sisters. Another son, Mario, died in 1993. Her husband, José García Cruz, whom she married in 1965, died of renal failure in 2021.
In 2020, Ms. Aguilar sculpted a heart-rending piece of a woman whose skirt was covered by figures wearing Covid masks — including a doctor, wearing wings, who was attending to a patient attached to an intravenous tube. She kept working without sight almost until her death.
“It’s not the eyes,” she told Mr. Goldberg, “but the hands and the brain that matter.”
