Gail Bird Yazzie Johnson | |
|---|---|
 Southwest American Indian jewelry artist, Gail Bird, in 1979 | |
| Born | 1949 (Gail Bird) 1946 (Yazzie Johnson) |
Gail Bird and Yazzie Johnson are Southwest American Indian artists known for their innovative jewelry which uses varied stones and blends both contemporary and prehistoric design motifs.
Gail Bird was born in 1949 at Oakland, California. [1] Her father, Tony Bird, was from Santo Domingo Pueblo and her mother, Andrea, was from Laguna Pueblo. Tony worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad and her mother worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs Inter-Mountain Indian School in Brigham City, Utah. She and Yazzie Johnson had known each other since childhood. After high school, Bird studied at University of California Berkeley and the University of Colorado at Boulder. [2]
Yazzie Johnson was born in 1946 in Winslow, Arizona. [1] His father, Matthew Johnson, was from Leupp, Arizona and his mother, Marilyn, was from Sanostee, New Mexico, both from the Navajo Nation. Both his parents worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs Inter-Mountain Indian School in Brigham City, Utah where he met Gail Bird at age fourteen. He was influenced at an early age by one of the teachers at the School, Dooley D. Shorty, who was a silversmith (and had been a Navajo Code Talker in World War II). Johnson enlisted in the U. S. Army in 1966 and served in Germany and Vietnam. He studied at University of California Berkeley and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The artists have known each other since they were children and have collaborated in designing and fabricating jewelry since 1972. [3]
Bird and Johnson use non-traditional stones, often resembling landscapes and uncommon juxtapositions of materials like pearls, opals and dinosaur bone. [4]
To many, they are best known for the thematic belts they make each year (since 1979) for the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA) Santa Fe Indian Market, [5] but they also design elegant earrings, bracelets, rings and necklaces which are shown in galleries and museums across the country. [3] In 1981 they won Best of Show for such a belt at the Santa Fe Indian Market. [6] They are part of a generation of American Indian artists from the Southwest who have acknowledged and honored the traditions of their respective areas while pushing the creative boundaries and addressing contemporary concerns. Their work is characterized by an extensive knowledge of materials and by their technical skill and keen design sense… Bird and Johnson emphasize, “We see our jewelry as being very traditional in nature. But we carry the traditions further. The stones we use are of a wider variety than those usually associated with Indian jewelry. The symbols and narrative on our pieces are expansions of traditional symbols and stories.” [7]
Southwest Native American art dealer and book author Martha Hopkins Lanman Struever held the first gallery show for Bird and Johnson in Chicago in 1978. Struever describes their work, “The jewelry they produce is distinct from the work of other American Indian jewelers. Their pieces are frequently dramatic and always wearable. By seeking out stones of unusual color and surface pattern or pearls of various shapes and hues, then juxtaposing them in original compositions, they have created a unique style. After years of visiting prehistoric pictograph and petroglyph sites, Gail and Yazzie realized that these ancient peoples had developed a distinctive set of designs, from which they have drawn much inspiration. Over their career of more than three decades, Gail and Yazzie have developed a body of work that is both distinctly their own and continuously evolving.” [8] The photos of Bird and Johnson featured in this article were taken by Ms. Struever at the Santa Fe Indian Market in 1979.
In 1981, Bird and Johnson won Best of Show at the Santa Fe Indian Market. More recently, they have become famous for their necklaces which often carry designs on the reverse side of bezel-set stones which reflect symbols that are personalized to the intended wearer. They use an overlay technique, which they describe as "underlay", that was inspired by Charles Loloma's stone inlay designs on the interior sides of rings and bracelets. [9]
The couple live and work in northern New Mexico. [10] [2]
The jewelry works of Bird and Johnson are included in the permanent collections of several museums, including the British Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design, the National Museum of Scotland and the Smithsonian Institution. [11] In 2022, the Heard Museum acquired one of the largest and most complex pieces every made by the artists, entitled All Things Hopi Belt. The belt was made in 2005 for Martha Hopkins Lanman Struever, a scholar of Hopi art and culture. The buckle reverse of a Hopi design of a hand with a bracelet refers to Struever’s love of jewelry. The belt is silver with 18k gold applique and embellished with Yowah opals, coral, turquoise, petrified pinecone and various jaspers and agates (see photo). [12]
In 2007 the book “Shared Images: The Innovative Jewelry of Yazzie Johnson and Gail Bird” was written about Johnson and Bird’s jewelry work. [13]
Bird and Johnson's work is held in numerous collections including the Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum of the American Indian, [14] the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, [15] among others.
The Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) is a public tribal land-grant college in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States. The college focuses on Native American art. It operates the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), which is housed in the historic Santa Fe Federal Building, a landmark Pueblo Revival building listed on the National Register of Historic Places as Federal Building. The museum houses the National Collection of Contemporary Indian Art, with more than 7,000 items.
The Santa Fe Indian Market is an annual art market held in Santa Fe, New Mexico on the weekend following the third Thursday in August. The event draws an estimated 150,000 people to the city from around the world. The Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA) organizes the market, showcasing work from 1,200 of the top Native American artists from tribes across the country.
Fred Kabotie was a celebrated Hopi painter, silversmith, illustrator, potter, author, curator and educator. His native name in the Hopi language is Naqavoy'ma which translates to Day After Day.
Melanie A. Yazzie is a Navajo sculptor, painter, printmaker, and professor. She teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Charles Sequevya Loloma was a Hopi Native American artist known for his jewelry. He also worked in pottery, painting and ceramics.
Martha Hopkins Struever (1931–2017) was an American Indian art dealer, author, and leading scholar on historic and contemporary Pueblo Indian pottery and Pueblo and Navajo Indian jewelry. In June 2015, a new gallery in the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, was named for her. The first permanent museum gallery devoted to Native American jewelry, the Martha Hopkins Struever Gallery, is part of the Center for the Study of Southwestern Jewelry.
Native American jewelry refers to items of personal adornment, whether for personal use, sale or as art; examples of which include necklaces, earrings, bracelets, rings and pins, as well as ketohs, wampum, and labrets, made by one of the Indigenous peoples of the United States. Native American jewelry normally reflects the cultural diversity and history of its makers, but tribal groups have often borrowed and copied designs and methods from other, neighboring tribes or nations with which they had trade, and this practice continues today. Native American tribes continue to develop distinct aesthetics rooted in their personal artistic visions and cultural traditions. Artists may create jewelry for adornment, ceremonies, and display, or for sale or trade. Lois Sherr Dubin writes, "[i]n the absence of written languages, adornment became an important element of Indian communication, conveying many levels of information." Later, jewelry and personal adornment "...signaled resistance to assimilation. It remains a major statement of tribal and individual identity."
Bob Haozous is a Chiricahua Apache sculptor from Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is enrolled in the Fort Sill Apache Tribe.
Art of the American Southwest is the visual arts of the Southwestern United States. This region encompasses Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of California, Colorado, Nevada, Texas, and Utah. These arts include architecture, ceramics, drawing, filmmaking, painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, and other media, ranging from the ancient past to the contemporary arts of the present day.
Dextra Quotskuyva Nampeyo was a Native American potter and artist. She was in the fifth generation of a distinguished ancestral line of Hopi potters.
Allen Raj was a Hopi artist and silversmith in Hopi silver overlay and stone inlay, featuring the lapidary genres of commesso and intarsia. Sekaquaptewa used colorful stones and shell for his Hopi silver overlay, not only plain silver decorated with chisel strokes on black oxide surfaces, a Hopi-signature technique known as matting.
Nathan Begaye (1969–2010) was a Native American ceramics artist of Navajo and Hopi descent.
Jolene Nenibah Yazzie is an American graphic designer, specializing in comic art. Her artwork predominantly features women as Native American warriors, and she utilizes bright colors and contrast in her works.
Otellie Loloma was a Hopi Native American artist, specializing in pottery and dance. Additionally, she worked with her husband Charles Loloma on jewelry design.
Iva Casuse Honwynum is a Hopi/Navajo artist, social activist, and cultural practitioner. A Native American, Honwynum is best known for her woven baskets and figurative sculpture. Honwynum's most important breakthrough was the development of the pootsaya basket, called "a rare innovation in Hopi basketry". She developed the pootsaya during her 2014 residency at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, having been awarded the Eric and Barbara Dookin Artist Fellowship.
Christine McHorse, also known as Christine Nofchissey McHorse, was a Navajo ceramic artist from Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Keri Ataumbi is a Kiowa artist, who paints and sculpts, but is most known as a jewelry maker. Her works have been featured in exhibits and permanent collections of various museums including the Heard Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Peabody Essex Museum, Philbrook Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. In 2015, she and her sister, Teri Greeves were honored as Living Treasures by the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Clifford Beck, Jr. was a Navajo American painter, illustrator, photographer and educator born in Keams Canyon, Arizona. He exhibited his work across the United States and is known for his work in oils and pastels, particularly his portraits of older native people.