Pablita Velarde was born Tse Tsan at Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico. After the death of her mother when Pablita was about five years old, she and two of her sisters were sent to St Catherine's Indian School in Santa Fe. At the age of fourteen, she was accepted to Dorothy Dunn's Santa Fe Studio Art School at the Santa Fe Indian School. There, she become an accomplished painter in the Dunn style, known as "flat painting". In 1939, Velarde was commissioned by the National Park Service under a grant from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to depict scenes of traditional Pueblo life for visitors to the Bandelier National Monument.