( 
)
continued from Part 1.....
Old & Modern Techniques
As demand for Southwestern Indian jewelry increased, through the 1920s, the increased highway and rail transportation and trade brought electricity into many homes on the Pueblos and nearby towns. Every town-living Navajo smith could avail themselves of new technology: high temperature gas torches instead of the old gasoline-powered blowtorches, electric buffing wheels, electric diamond stone cutting wheels, multi-temperature solder, fine-quality imported tools, etc. Many still made many of their tools, but as new tools were found to work better, they traded off the old ones. Skills began to improve quickly. New York buyers began to visit the Southwest to bring home arm-loads of the evocative jewelry. By the mid-1920s, Santa Fe had become a tourist Mecca.
One of the oldest techniques employed by Southwestern Indian artisans was and is called "sand-casting", which actually employs two matched blocks of porous volcanic stone called tufa. This is compressed pumice, and is easily carved with chisels and woodworking gouges, into attractive patterns, making a rough mold. The second block is laid alongside the carved surface and the two are bound together. A hollow carved into the top of both acts as a funnel, allowing the silver smith to melt silver in a crucible, then, using tongs, pour the molten silver into the top of the tufa mold. Sometimes, if the carving is done properly, and sufficient "breathing" channels are carved into the blocks, the mold will withstand several "pours" and multiple items can thus be made -- an early form of mass-production. Still, to clean up the rough castings is very time-consuming, so the technique has become relegated into the tool bag of traditionalists, more and more. These days, most accomplished Navajo silversmiths will utilize the modern, lost-wax method of vacuum casting if they need to produce multiples. It is still not common in Navajo jewelry making, but a good example of sand-cast work is a marvel, and usually quite heavy for it's size.
Another area in which there has been a great deal of evolution is in lapidary and stone setting. Zuni silver work is generally hailed as the most intricate work done in the Southwest. Maybe as a result of their very balanced, conservative, Zuni-centric culture, their work progressed very quickly, into intricate forms. As late as the 1950's, Navajo silversmiths would collaborate regularly with Zuni lapidarists to cut stones and fit them into the settings that the Navajo artist might make. This was especially true of the technique called channel inlay, in which small boxes are made in a pattern to hold stones, and the stones carefully cut to fit into them. Another originally Navajo technique that has become almost exclusively Zuni is Petite Point Cluster work. Navajo artists would create cluster silver settings using multiple bezels made in small pear-shaped cups to create a circular pattern, into which Zuni-cut turquoise and coral stones were set. The advent of serrated, factory produced bezel wire in the 1950s, added to the demand for more, ever-smaller sized stones in a single piece of jewelry got the Zunis interested in creating the silver settings themselves, which they have done with amazing skill. Today, a needlepoint (fine, thin stones individually cut) turquoise pin, for example might hold over a hundred individually cut ans set stones.
Bezels for stone setting began in Navajo work, in the late 1900s with self-made bezels from thin soft sterling wire. These were made quite deep, and were straight sided. The stones were often set quite high in the bezel cup, substantially raised from the item's surface. Navajo smiths have always used sawdust in their bezel cups, to help in setting the stones. Sawdust is put into the empty cup, and the stone added on top of it. The silversmith then puts pressure on the stone, which rebounds into the soft sawdust, as the bezel is burnished over tightly around the stone. The resulting spring pad of compressed sawdust protects the stone from impact damage and keeps the setting snug, for some time. Eventually, of course, the setting will loosen, requiring re-tightening, or even new sawdust. Water can make its way beneath a stone. Sometimes the sawdust becomes saturated, and expands, breaking or cracking the stone. Water was never much of a problem for Southwestern jewelry owners, though, so the technique persists to this day. Since the 1960s, pre-formed sterling bezel cups have been available to Southwestern American Indian silversmiths, speeding the work of stone setting considerably. Another item, that helps them finish work faster is the availability of pre-shaped, calibrated size cabochons in most of the stones traditionally used, as well as many new ones, such as garnet, citrine and topaz.
The shaping of stones has also evolved, along tow specific paths: Specimen stones and stones for inlay. The Navajo silversmith is sometimes described as having built a bracelet, for example, around a wonderful stone, while the Zuni artist may be said to build an intricate bracelet in sterling, into which stones are set to enhance the design. The two descriptions seem to be pretty accurate, although design is a concept in constant flux, and there is substantial overlap between the styles of Zuni and Navajo work, especially the newest inlay, micro-inlay as practiced by several Navajo jewelers. Zuni inlay is more frequently pictorial, with stones cut to carefully pre-determined shapes to fill in the colors of an image -- a spirit, a rainbow, or other typical subject. Rounded shapes are often used by Zuni inlayers while Navajo inlayers typically shied away from rounded forms in inlay, preferring rectangular and triangular forms making up a more abstract pattern of color and texture. From its most primitive forms as found on early Puebloan mosaic jewelry, inlay has progressed through intricate geometic patterns of same-stones to the multi-stone, pictorial forms we see today. Its all about better lighting, better cutting tools and wheels and better adhesives to back the work and hold it together. Today, sterling channels -- thin slivers of silver -- are often laid up with the stones in inlaid settings, rather than being part of the underlying sterling item, all bound together seamlessly by a strong epoxy backing.
Specimen stones, often turquoise chosen for singular beauty of markings and color, at the beginning were roughly shaped by files, or a grindstone powered by a kick-wheel or treadle. The soft stone would yield rapidly and even hand-finish reasonably well. The artist would then smooth the top over and polish it with sandstone of varying grits until it could be finished with tallow and a sheep skin to polish it. The surviving examples are not very bright! In the 1920s, along with electricity, came Jewelers' Supply Houses in some of the border towns near the reservations. These were usually found along with a general trading post. The artists now had access to manufactured clasps, earring backs, and other "findings" with which to improve their work. Better abrasives and finishing compounds, better adhesives, better tools.
Sheet and strip sterling began to be available along with many gauges of wire, round, half-round and triangular. In late years, even gold and platinum is available to artists. Better epoxies, refined for jewelry work, now allow great liberties in inlay design. As a result of the availability of these supplies, Southwestern Indian jewelry is not as heavy as it once was, but the work is consistently better: better finish, better design, better execution, and more color! There are still Navajo artists who cast ingot and hammer them into shape to recreate the work of past generations, so if you want an item that feels heavy in the hand, some one makes that, too! The market demand has had a generally positive effect on American Indian artists, although it has also created the demand for lower and lower price point, often resulting in offshore copying in mass-production facilities. As in every art, the more creative and reliable artists are rewarded the best.
The 1960s saw the beginning of new, unusual stones' arrival to the Southwest. Importers now found that the market for rough stone from all over the world was exploding, and so they began to stock greater and greater variety. Today, in terms of stone choices, you can find anything you want, designed and handmade somewhere by an American Indian jeweler. The ranges of available color and texture are limitless. Turquoise may be the stone that first comes to mind, but the "skystone" is now, just one of many choices.
Sterling Overlay -- A Collaborative Story
As the cultures of the original inhabitants of the Southwest have endured despite everything time and change can throw at them, so will their arts endure and evolve. Today, you can find intricate, pave diamond settings on inlaid items in platinum made by Navajo and Zuni jewelers. You can also still find a heavy sterling turquoise tooled cuff at a reasonable price. There is no apparent end to where these artists will take their art. When you wear one of their pieces, you wear an entire history, but also the key to the future! Wear it well, and wear it with pride!
The above is original work and may not be re-used, copied or reprinted off Ebay without permission
(c)2007, R.Sutton for Kiva Corporation
Old & Modern Techniques
As demand for Southwestern Indian jewelry increased, through the 1920s, the increased highway and rail transportation and trade brought electricity into many homes on the Pueblos and nearby towns. Every town-living Navajo smith could avail themselves of new technology: high temperature gas torches instead of the old gasoline-powered blowtorches, electric buffing wheels, electric diamond stone cutting wheels, multi-temperature solder, fine-quality imported tools, etc. Many still made many of their tools, but as new tools were found to work better, they traded off the old ones. Skills began to improve quickly. New York buyers began to visit the Southwest to bring home arm-loads of the evocative jewelry. By the mid-1920s, Santa Fe had become a tourist Mecca.
One of the oldest techniques employed by Southwestern Indian artisans was and is called "sand-casting", which actually employs two matched blocks of porous volcanic stone called tufa. This is compressed pumice, and is easily carved with chisels and woodworking gouges, into attractive patterns, making a rough mold. The second block is laid alongside the carved surface and the two are bound together. A hollow carved into the top of both acts as a funnel, allowing the silver smith to melt silver in a crucible, then, using tongs, pour the molten silver into the top of the tufa mold. Sometimes, if the carving is done properly, and sufficient "breathing" channels are carved into the blocks, the mold will withstand several "pours" and multiple items can thus be made -- an early form of mass-production. Still, to clean up the rough castings is very time-consuming, so the technique has become relegated into the tool bag of traditionalists, more and more. These days, most accomplished Navajo silversmiths will utilize the modern, lost-wax method of vacuum casting if they need to produce multiples. It is still not common in Navajo jewelry making, but a good example of sand-cast work is a marvel, and usually quite heavy for it's size.
Another area in which there has been a great deal of evolution is in lapidary and stone setting. Zuni silver work is generally hailed as the most intricate work done in the Southwest. Maybe as a result of their very balanced, conservative, Zuni-centric culture, their work progressed very quickly, into intricate forms. As late as the 1950's, Navajo silversmiths would collaborate regularly with Zuni lapidarists to cut stones and fit them into the settings that the Navajo artist might make. This was especially true of the technique called channel inlay, in which small boxes are made in a pattern to hold stones, and the stones carefully cut to fit into them. Another originally Navajo technique that has become almost exclusively Zuni is Petite Point Cluster work. Navajo artists would create cluster silver settings using multiple bezels made in small pear-shaped cups to create a circular pattern, into which Zuni-cut turquoise and coral stones were set. The advent of serrated, factory produced bezel wire in the 1950s, added to the demand for more, ever-smaller sized stones in a single piece of jewelry got the Zunis interested in creating the silver settings themselves, which they have done with amazing skill. Today, a needlepoint (fine, thin stones individually cut) turquoise pin, for example might hold over a hundred individually cut ans set stones.
Bezels for stone setting began in Navajo work, in the late 1900s with self-made bezels from thin soft sterling wire. These were made quite deep, and were straight sided. The stones were often set quite high in the bezel cup, substantially raised from the item's surface. Navajo smiths have always used sawdust in their bezel cups, to help in setting the stones. Sawdust is put into the empty cup, and the stone added on top of it. The silversmith then puts pressure on the stone, which rebounds into the soft sawdust, as the bezel is burnished over tightly around the stone. The resulting spring pad of compressed sawdust protects the stone from impact damage and keeps the setting snug, for some time. Eventually, of course, the setting will loosen, requiring re-tightening, or even new sawdust. Water can make its way beneath a stone. Sometimes the sawdust becomes saturated, and expands, breaking or cracking the stone. Water was never much of a problem for Southwestern jewelry owners, though, so the technique persists to this day. Since the 1960s, pre-formed sterling bezel cups have been available to Southwestern American Indian silversmiths, speeding the work of stone setting considerably. Another item, that helps them finish work faster is the availability of pre-shaped, calibrated size cabochons in most of the stones traditionally used, as well as many new ones, such as garnet, citrine and topaz.
The shaping of stones has also evolved, along tow specific paths: Specimen stones and stones for inlay. The Navajo silversmith is sometimes described as having built a bracelet, for example, around a wonderful stone, while the Zuni artist may be said to build an intricate bracelet in sterling, into which stones are set to enhance the design. The two descriptions seem to be pretty accurate, although design is a concept in constant flux, and there is substantial overlap between the styles of Zuni and Navajo work, especially the newest inlay, micro-inlay as practiced by several Navajo jewelers. Zuni inlay is more frequently pictorial, with stones cut to carefully pre-determined shapes to fill in the colors of an image -- a spirit, a rainbow, or other typical subject. Rounded shapes are often used by Zuni inlayers while Navajo inlayers typically shied away from rounded forms in inlay, preferring rectangular and triangular forms making up a more abstract pattern of color and texture. From its most primitive forms as found on early Puebloan mosaic jewelry, inlay has progressed through intricate geometic patterns of same-stones to the multi-stone, pictorial forms we see today. Its all about better lighting, better cutting tools and wheels and better adhesives to back the work and hold it together. Today, sterling channels -- thin slivers of silver -- are often laid up with the stones in inlaid settings, rather than being part of the underlying sterling item, all bound together seamlessly by a strong epoxy backing.
Specimen stones, often turquoise chosen for singular beauty of markings and color, at the beginning were roughly shaped by files, or a grindstone powered by a kick-wheel or treadle. The soft stone would yield rapidly and even hand-finish reasonably well. The artist would then smooth the top over and polish it with sandstone of varying grits until it could be finished with tallow and a sheep skin to polish it. The surviving examples are not very bright! In the 1920s, along with electricity, came Jewelers' Supply Houses in some of the border towns near the reservations. These were usually found along with a general trading post. The artists now had access to manufactured clasps, earring backs, and other "findings" with which to improve their work. Better abrasives and finishing compounds, better adhesives, better tools.
Sheet and strip sterling began to be available along with many gauges of wire, round, half-round and triangular. In late years, even gold and platinum is available to artists. Better epoxies, refined for jewelry work, now allow great liberties in inlay design. As a result of the availability of these supplies, Southwestern Indian jewelry is not as heavy as it once was, but the work is consistently better: better finish, better design, better execution, and more color! There are still Navajo artists who cast ingot and hammer them into shape to recreate the work of past generations, so if you want an item that feels heavy in the hand, some one makes that, too! The market demand has had a generally positive effect on American Indian artists, although it has also created the demand for lower and lower price point, often resulting in offshore copying in mass-production facilities. As in every art, the more creative and reliable artists are rewarded the best.
The 1960s saw the beginning of new, unusual stones' arrival to the Southwest. Importers now found that the market for rough stone from all over the world was exploding, and so they began to stock greater and greater variety. Today, in terms of stone choices, you can find anything you want, designed and handmade somewhere by an American Indian jeweler. The ranges of available color and texture are limitless. Turquoise may be the stone that first comes to mind, but the "skystone" is now, just one of many choices.
Sterling Overlay -- A Collaborative Story
After
World War II, Hopi artists, returning to their mesa-top communities
brough back an awareness of the potential to sell their arts
worldwide. Their distinctive pottery was in demand by collectors and
they already had several well-respected silversmiths among them. Most
Hopi silver work, in those days, was very similar to Navajo traditional
work. They had learned their skills from Navajo smiths, and so
continued the traditions. But a group of GIs, along with a non-Indian
husband and wife -- anthropologists and curators at the Museum of
Northern Arizona saw the need for Hopis to make and sell jewelry that
was distinctly "Hopi", instead of the jewelry then made up on the mesas.
Barton Wright, his wife, and a young Hopi man named Milland Lomakema, among others, had just finished a major excavation and study of the abandoned Hopi village Sityatki, and from it's mounds had extracted examples of decorated pottery distinctively different from the pottery of the New Mexico Pueblos. They began to think that if some of these designs could be worked into silver, it would be truly "Hopi" in form and design. Several contributed their GI Bill money to found the Hopi Crafts Co-operative to teach improved silversmithing skills, and to help create a Hopi ideal in sterling jewelry. The result was the overlay technique. A sheet of sterling was cut out by hand, pierced in Hopi designs, then soldered down to another layer of sterling. The background that resulted was tooled and textured, then the entire piece was oxidized black in Liver of Sulphur. When the oxidation was either buffed or brushed off the top layer, it revealed the design in sharp contrast! This was unusual for the time, and very distinctive.
Hopi jewelers who took the courses and learned the techniques found their work was in high demand. It had gained worldwide respect, and soon, even European customers were seeking the very best of its kind. The remote Hopi mesas became places where a German family might share a table with a Japanese family -- both wanting to buy the same Hopi overlay cuff! Hopi artists jouneyed to European jeweler's symposiums and brought back insight on new ways to achieve the desired goals. Even internationally respected jewelers such as the Danish George Jensen, traveled to learn of this work, teaching his skills to Hopi jewelers as well.
The techniques refined, improving over time until Hopi smiths were unequaled in their ability to produce this work. Navajo silversmiths, too saw the potential in the technique, and began working in it, first in similar design, then increasingly, in designs inspired by life in the Navajo homeland -- mesas, horses, goats, even pickup trucks made their appearance in this new, highly pictorial style. It evolved into Navajo "story" jewelry. In its best form, it differs from Hopi overlay not only in the subject matter, but also in the wider use of top-surface tooling and texturing, as well as a bright finish while Hopi overlay usually exhibits a dull, brushed finish. Of course, there are many exceptions, and they just illustrate how these arts are constantly evolving and adapting.
Today and TomorrowBarton Wright, his wife, and a young Hopi man named Milland Lomakema, among others, had just finished a major excavation and study of the abandoned Hopi village Sityatki, and from it's mounds had extracted examples of decorated pottery distinctively different from the pottery of the New Mexico Pueblos. They began to think that if some of these designs could be worked into silver, it would be truly "Hopi" in form and design. Several contributed their GI Bill money to found the Hopi Crafts Co-operative to teach improved silversmithing skills, and to help create a Hopi ideal in sterling jewelry. The result was the overlay technique. A sheet of sterling was cut out by hand, pierced in Hopi designs, then soldered down to another layer of sterling. The background that resulted was tooled and textured, then the entire piece was oxidized black in Liver of Sulphur. When the oxidation was either buffed or brushed off the top layer, it revealed the design in sharp contrast! This was unusual for the time, and very distinctive.
Hopi jewelers who took the courses and learned the techniques found their work was in high demand. It had gained worldwide respect, and soon, even European customers were seeking the very best of its kind. The remote Hopi mesas became places where a German family might share a table with a Japanese family -- both wanting to buy the same Hopi overlay cuff! Hopi artists jouneyed to European jeweler's symposiums and brought back insight on new ways to achieve the desired goals. Even internationally respected jewelers such as the Danish George Jensen, traveled to learn of this work, teaching his skills to Hopi jewelers as well.
The techniques refined, improving over time until Hopi smiths were unequaled in their ability to produce this work. Navajo silversmiths, too saw the potential in the technique, and began working in it, first in similar design, then increasingly, in designs inspired by life in the Navajo homeland -- mesas, horses, goats, even pickup trucks made their appearance in this new, highly pictorial style. It evolved into Navajo "story" jewelry. In its best form, it differs from Hopi overlay not only in the subject matter, but also in the wider use of top-surface tooling and texturing, as well as a bright finish while Hopi overlay usually exhibits a dull, brushed finish. Of course, there are many exceptions, and they just illustrate how these arts are constantly evolving and adapting.
As the cultures of the original inhabitants of the Southwest have endured despite everything time and change can throw at them, so will their arts endure and evolve. Today, you can find intricate, pave diamond settings on inlaid items in platinum made by Navajo and Zuni jewelers. You can also still find a heavy sterling turquoise tooled cuff at a reasonable price. There is no apparent end to where these artists will take their art. When you wear one of their pieces, you wear an entire history, but also the key to the future! Wear it well, and wear it with pride!
The above is original work and may not be re-used, copied or reprinted off Ebay without permission
(c)2007, R.Sutton for Kiva Corporation
Guide created: 02/23/07 (updated 07/02/09)
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