With her meticulously researched and elegantly crafted dolls, Rhonda Holy Bear sees her role as artist this way: “Our past was shattered,” she reflects, “and I’m picking up all these crumbled pieces and putting them back together.” These “pieces” contain the dignity and pride of the Plains tribes people, their beadwork, quillwork and other highly refined skills, their history and stories, the symbolism and imagery that reflects their worldview, and the dress and adornment of people and horses that tied it all together as a cultural identity. Holy Bear brings it all together in her award-winning dolls, whose every aspect is based on scale-model authenticity and the desire to infuse her works with emotive depth.

Holy Bear, of Lakota and French ancestry, remembers listening to her Lakota grandmother tell about the long-lost doll her own grandmother had made for her. As an unusually creative child living in poverty on South Dakota’s Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, Holy Bear began cutting up old fabric to make doll clothes when she was very young. Before long she was heading to the reservation’s dumping ground, bringing home whatever she could find to make things with. Then, at 18, her attention was caught by a photograph of a late-1800s Plains Indian doll with beaded clothing. “I said, ‘I can bead,’ and decided to make one,” she recounts. “I was at a place where I was wondering what to do with my life, and the answer that came was to never stop playing—with dolls!”

Now 45, Holy Bear puts so much time and work into each piece that she is able to create only two or three dolls each year. She carves gracefully elongated human or horse figures from kiln-dried basswood. She gives the dolls strong, serene facial expressions and incorporates scrupulously realistic detail in their clothing and accessories. Among the materials that go into her work are hundreds of tiny antique micro-beads, brain-tanned antelope hide, human hair, silk ribbon, sinew for sewing clothing and porcupine claws to replicate miniature bear claws. “I want people to see how proud, how dignified, free and cultured we were in that glorious (mid- to late 19th century) time period,” she explains. “We were the epitome of all that.”

Holy Bear may be contacted at www.rhondaholybear.com, which provides high-quality photographic posters of her dolls. At the Heard show she plans to present a finely adorned Crow horse and rider, among other dolls.

Photo caption: Crow Portrait by Rhonda Holy Bear (Lakota) copyright 2004, 27", carved bass wood with antique micro sead beads on brain-tanned antelope skin and ermine skin. Photo by Trent Black/From the private collection of Randall and Teresa Willis.

Jared Chavez

When Jared Chavez says he “grew up in” his father’s studio, he means it literally. He had his own little play area in one section of the studio where his father, acclaimed San Felipe Pueblo jewelry artist Richard Chavez, worked while keeping an eye on his young son. As he got older, Jared paid more attention to what his father was doing and started thinking it looked like fun. Then one hot summer day when Jared was 10, he complained of being bored. His father offered to teach him to make jewelry, but with one stipulation: If Jared decided to do it, he must give it his complete attention and all his energy. “My father gave me all the basic tools,” he recalls. “Then I was like a blank slate, with my creativity allowed to run free.”

These days the younger Chavez can’t say he’s putting all his energy into jewelry. At 22, he’s well into his senior year at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where his major is digital arts—including graphic and Web design, animation and filmmaking. He’s also exploring ways his design aesthetic reveals itself through printmaking and painting. Still, jewelry and silverwork remain the core of his artistic expression. Following graduation, he plans to attend the Revere Academy for Jewelers in San Francisco. And any time he’s back home in New Mexico at San Felipe Pueblo, he heads for the studio he still shares with his father.

While Chavez creates bracelets, necklaces and rings, he is perhaps best known for his small silver vessels, many of which take the form of rounded boxes or cups with lids. As with his jewelry, these often feature stamped designs and strong geometric patterns, and they highlight the play of contrast between brightly polished and textured areas. With bracelets in particular, he often creates texture by casting the silver in tufa or hardened volcanic ash. “Tufa is a traditional practice,” he notes, “but I wanted to bring it to the contemporary edge.”

On his mother’s side, the artist is of Hopi/Tewa and Navajo descent. Yet his inspiration also derives from the aesthetic of such artists as Japanese woodblock printmaker Hiroshige and from Modernist, abstract and Impressionist painting. Running throughout Chavez’s work is an emphasis on line and on the simplicity of clean designs.

In addition to exhibiting at the annual Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market and at the Santa Fe Indian Market, Chavez’s art is on view at Four Winds Gallery in Pittsburgh and Tribal Expressions in Arlington Heights, Illinois.

Photo caption: “Two Worlds Under One Sky,” by Jared Chavez (Hopi/Tewa/Navajo), 2003, sterling silver, 7" w x 41⁄2" h x 33⁄4" d.

Liz Wallace

Liz Wallace is of Navajo and Washoe/Maidu heritage, yet one of the most influential figures in the career of this Northern California–born jewelry artist is a Yankee craftsman from New England. Wallace, 28, has been designing and creating silver and turquoise jewelry for most of the past decade. Two years ago, she was invited to spend time in the New Salem, Massachusetts, studio of master jeweler and jewelry repair expert Bob Bauver. The experience “woke up” and energized her creative spirit, she recalls. With newly acquired techniques and materials, she suddenly had the ability to more freely explore the diverse areas of design inspiration that have enticed her since childhood.
Both of Wallace’s parents were jewelry artists when she was young, and they included her on trips to Santa Fe Indian Market. As a result, she absorbed a love of turquoise and silverwork, especially as expressed in traditional Navajo jewelry design. Yet her own exquisitely crafted pieces reveal an equal fascination with floral forms, architectural details, insect life, the graceful fluidity of Art Nouveau and the stylized lines of Art Deco design. All of these are reflected in her work, which blends traditional motifs and methods with a highly contemporary look.

In her early 20s, Wallace gained a foundation in jewelry creation while working at a Santa Fe gallery and doing jewelry repair for a local art dealer. Primarily self-taught, she developed a style of earrings that sold well and was picked up by buyers for Ralph Lauren. But she was restless to stretch her artistic wings, and the opportunity to sit at a workbench beside Bauver was just what she needed. Among the techniques Wallace learned from Bauver is the enormously time-consuming process of plique à jour, translucent enamel well suited for Art Nouveau–inspired designs. She also does the lapidary work for her jewelry and is learning blacksmithing in order to fabricate her own silversmithing tools.

Wallace’s jewelry at the Heard show will include pieces in which the wings of butterflies or other insects, or flowers and foliage, are made of richly hued plique à jour enamel. Known as well for her use of high-quality turquoise, she also incorporates coral, pearls, petrified wood, opal and other stones, and occasionally works in copper or gold.
Wallace is represented by Martha Struever of Santa Fe; the Shiprock Trading Co. of Albuquerque and Shiprock; and the Rainbow Man of Santa Fe.

Photo caption: Butterfly pin by Liz Wallace (Navajo/ Washoe/Maidu), 2004, #8 natural turquoise set in silver. Plique à jour cicada pin by Liz Wallace (Navajo/ Washoe/Maidu), with silver and gold, mother of pearl, ruby and glass enamel. Photos by Hilary Wallace Brelsford.

Donald Sockyma

For Hopi artist Donald Sockyma, carving katsina dolls is as natural and integral to his life in the village of Kykotsmovi, at the foot of Third Mesa in northeastern Arizona, as breathing. He has watched and taken part in the Katsina dances as long as he can remember, following the drumbeat’s rhythm as the people look to Katsina spirit beings for blessings of rain, prosperity and peace. Sockyma’s father, Bennett Sockyma, started teaching Donald to carve in the second grade, giving his young son a piece of soft cottonwood root and showing him how to shape a simple, flat katsina doll. As a boy, Sockyma also carved alongside his older cousin and uncle, watching them and learning to use basic hand tools to cut away and shape the wood.

At 21, Sockyma still carves at the dining room table beside his father, or outside when the weather is nice, and the two make regular trips to Sedona, Arizona, to sell their work. While this will be the younger Sockyma’s first time taking part in the Heard Guild Indian Fair & Market, the artist has earned a number of awards in years past, including first place and best of division at the museum’s annual Guild Native American Student Art Show & Sale (see Jan./Feb. 2004 issue). His work is known for its stylized simplicity, craftsmanship and design impact.

Unlike many contemporary carvers, Sockyma uses no power tools, instead relying on labor-intensive hand carving. From a single block of cottonwood root, he roughs out a figure and base with a hacksaw blade and then turns to knives to refine and add detail, finishing the piece with acrylic paints. “You can tell I don’t use a Dremel—my dolls have less wrinkles and not as much detail,” he notes. “If you use nothing but a knife doing all that detail work, it would take forever.” As it is, each figure takes much patience and about two weeks for the artist to complete, working on it every day.

Some katsina figures, like Crow Mother, Sockyma carves fairly often. For others, he simply turns to the dances. “Usually, we have ceremonies in winter and summer, and if I want to carve a new one I look at them at the dance,” he explains. “I put it in my memory. I know from experience what they wear. It’s been here for so long, we wouldn’t forget it. We keep it in our head.”

Sockyma’s katsina carvings are available through Humiovi Gallery in Sedona, Arizona.

Photo caption: Sunface katsina doll by Donald Sockyma (Hopi), 12", cottonwood root. Photo by Hilary Wallace Brelsford.
Photo9 caption: Deer Dancer katsina doll by Donald Sockyma (Hopi), 14", cottonwood root. Photo by Hilary Wallace Brelsford.
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