Native American & Taxco Jewelry
Two silver traditions sit side by side in this collection, and they belong together. Both grew out of the same ground — the silver country of the American Southwest and Mexico — and both were made by hand, at the bench, by smiths whose names and marks collectors still read like signatures. On one side, the jewelry of the Navajo, Zuni, Hopi, and Santo Domingo makers; on the other, the sterling of Taxco, the Mexican silver town whose workshops set the standard for hand-wrought silver in the twentieth century.
Native American silver begins with the Navajo smiths of the 1860s and 1870s, who learned metalwork and turned it into something entirely their own: heavy ingot silver hammered and filed by hand, then stamped, chased, and sandcast into bracelets, concho belts, ketoh bow guards, and the squash blossom necklaces that remain the emblem of the craft. The Zuni brought stone to the front — turquoise, coral, jet, and shell set in fine needlepoint, petit point, and channel inlay — while Hopi smiths developed the overlay, two layers of silver pierced and joined so the design reads in shadow. Turquoise is the stone the whole tradition turns on, and the mines have names of their own: Sleeping Beauty, Kingman, Morenci, Lone Mountain. Turn a genuine piece over and the back tells you as much as the front: a sterling mark, an artist's hallmark where one was used, the honest weight of silver that was worked, not cast thin.
Taxco is a steep silver-mining town in Guerrero, and in 1931 William Spratling opened the workshop that revived it. Within a generation the town held hundreds of talleres, and its best makers — Margot de Taxco, Los Castillo, Antonio Pineda, Héctor Aguilar among them — were producing silver that was sold in fine shops across Mexico and the United States and is collected today by the standard it was made to. Mexican silver is marked by law and by pride: the eagle guarantee marks of the mid century, the fineness stamped plainly at .925 and often .980, HECHO EN MEXICO, and the maker's own mark beside them. The work is heavy-gauge, hand-finished, and meant to be worn for a lifetime.
What do the marks on a Taxco or Native American piece tell you? More than any other single thing. The Mexican eagle numbers, the fineness stamp, and a maker's mark place a Taxco piece in its period and often at one identified bench; a Navajo or Zuni hallmark does the same for Southwestern work, and where a piece is unsigned — as much early Native work is — the construction, the stone, and the hand of the work carry the attribution. We read the marks on every piece that comes to us and state them plainly in its listing.
How should vintage silver be cared for? Wear it, wipe it with a soft cloth, and store it dry. A polishing cloth restores brightness without chemicals. Leave the dark shading in the deep stampwork and the recesses of the design where the maker put it — on this silver, the contrast between bright surface and shadowed ground is not tarnish to be removed; it is the finish the piece was made with.
