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Indigenous Brilliance
Marisa Bartolucci
05/02/2005
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The quality of the turquoise and the amount featured in a piece also plays a role in determining price. Southwest turquoise, which ranges in hue from robin’s egg blue to lima bean green, is becoming quite rare. Some famous old mines, such as Nevada’s Battle Mountain Blue Gem and No. 8, are depleted, so jewelry featuring their distinct varieties of stone is especially prized. “One collector offered me $10,000 for a single piece of No. 8,” Tanner says. “But I wouldn’t sell. It’s too important to the collection.” Traders such as Tanner often buy up the turquoise from dwindling mines, and then dole it out in nuggets to favored jewelers.
Beyond Tradition
While so much of life on the pueblo remains traditional, its jewelers in recent decades have become increasingly adventurous in their designs. Credit for their daring goes to the Navajo silversmith Kenneth Begay and the Hopi artists Charles Loloma and Preston Monongye. In their jewelry, these artisans broke from convention by drawing on currents in contemporary art and design. They also blurred tribal differences by mastering a variety of jewelry-making techniques.
Loloma was perhaps the most radical of the three. Instead of sticking to traditional flat stone inlays, he used chunky stones of irregular height and width to create highly sculptural bracelets and rings. Depending on the piece, the patterns and colorings of the inlays might suggest Pueblo architecture or the rock formations of the Hopi mesas. When Mononogye crafted silver jewelry from tufa casts, he retained its rough, sandy texture and decorated his pieces with raised line drawings. He borrowed imagery from old potsherds and pictographs, which he transformed into stylized inlaid forms.
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