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In theFleshA visit to Zuni reveals much about the character and skills of contemporary artists living and working there today.   By Iris McLister | Photography by Zoë Marieh Urness

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1. From left: Colin

Coonsis, Carlos Laate,

Charlotte Seoutewa,

Eldrick Seoutewa,

Roxanne Seoutewa,

Noreen Simplicio, and

her nephew Richard.

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technique, and meticulously composed designs.I-40 deposited us abruptly onto State Highway 53, a two-lane

road which winds through miles of wind-whipped wilderness, alternating between dense piñon forests and far-off mesas, crisply outlined against blue sky. Our drive was fortified by Pueblo gas station specialties—Kool-Aid-soaked pickles and chili cheese fries—and punctuated by the whir and click of Zoë’s camera. Swerving to avoid tumbleweeds the size of sheep, then slowing down to avoid hitting actual sheep, we entered the village of Zuni just before dusk. A looming mesa dominates the landscape. From afar, its striated, pale pink-and-cream sides resemble a cut-open layer cake, but up close it’s scraped-looking, jagged, a craggy mass feverishly lit by the

T o call Zuni, New Mexico, isolated doesn’t feel right, even though technically it is. Spanning 700 miles of land in the largely unpopulated central part of the state, the

reservation nudges right up against the Arizona border. It’s an otherworldly place, the sky above an overturned bowl of cerulean, scraped clean of clouds: bright, immense. Taking advantage of an unseasonably balmy, late-October weekend, photographer Zoë Marieh Urness and I decided to make the 211-mile road trip from Santa Fe to Zuni Pueblo to learn about the tribe’s distinctive jewelry.

From Albuquerque, we headed east on Interstate 40, driving through immense stretches of beautiful nothing, the in-between spaces of the New Mexico desert. Zuni has a population of around 10,000, making it New Mexico’s largest Pueblo; unlike many smaller Southwestern reservations, it has no casino, or even a single fast food restaurant. The Zuni speak a language unrelated to any other, and their traditional name (Zuni is a Spanish-given moniker of unknown origin) is A’shiwi, which translates to “The Flesh.” The tribe is deeply religious, with a network of intricate myths and stories that revolve around nature, animals and ancient ancestors. Their jewelry is distinctive, influenced certainly by others yet wholly unique, recognizable for its brilliant coloration, innovative

2. An inlay bracelet by

Colin Coonsis. Photo

courtesy the artist.

3. Veronica Poblano in

her studio.

4. Third-generation Zuni

artist Colin Coonsis.

technique, and meticulously composed designs.I-40 deposited us abruptly onto State Highway 53, a two-lane

road which winds through miles of wind-whipped wilderness,

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like smallpox and measles. Despite it all, the Zunis remained largely intact, even growing their population in the 1800s. Sure, the tribe is isolated, but it doesn’t feel like isolationism so much as a kind of radical, reverential preservation.

At Chu Chu’s, the last slice of green chile-and-cheese pizza was long gone, and a lone busboy swished a mop back and forth across the tile floor. As the crowd dispersed into the windy, black night, Zoë and I learned that the Inn at Halona—the town’s only hotel—was booked. Reluctantly, we left Zuni for the night and headed to a hotel in Gallup, a 45-minute drive through the now-darkened forest from which

sun. Zoë and I had planned to meet nine or 10 artists at Chu Chu’s Pizza, one of three restaurants in town, but the group swelled to more than 20, many adorned with their own glinting silver-and-stone bracelets and heishe bead earrings they had either made or acquired from family and friends. Once we were settled, I repeated a statistic I had found incredible: that up to a whopping half of all Zunis are artists. My question was met with laughter. “It’s gotta be much closer to 90 percent,” said potter Noreen Simplicio; around the table, heads nodded in agreement. “We teach weaving, pottery, carving and jewelry, all of that at our high school,” Simplicio said. “We don’t want our kids to lose these things. Here in Zuni, we aren’t just artists, but teachers, too.” It’s a powerful combination, especially since most of the lessons don’t take place in the classroom but at home, by what sounds like a virtually symbiotic process. “My parents never had to sit me down and teach me how to make jewelry,” explained Rolanda Haloo. “We were always around it. We just always saw our parents, aunties—everybody, always doing it.” Sitting nearby was Haloo’s son Colin Coonsis, a third-generation Zuni artist whose meticulously arranged, brilliantly hued inlay work sells out at his booth at Santa Fe’s Indian Market, often before breakfast. Soft-spoken but candid, Coonsis mentioned being inspired by his mother’s work from an early age, “I remember looking at her fire opal butterfly maiden and dragonfly pendants, and they gave me a feeling of intense happiness,” he said. “I must have been around 8 years old. After that I experimented with my own inlay, and each time I finished a piece I felt so alive and incredibly happy.”

When I asked about the grand mesa we’d seen driving into Zuni, I was first told it was called Corn Mountain but was corrected by Eldrick Seoutewa, an accomplished jeweler at the end of the table. “In Zuni, we call that Dowa Yalanne,” he said. Simplicio added, “It’s a spiritual mountain with a lot of history. The elders say it’s getting old, that it was once bright, but the colors are fading now.” Equal parts majestic and imposing, Dowa Yalanne provided refuge for the Zuni for centuries. In the 1600s, they fled from Spaniards to its top, a rocky fortress protecting them not only from European conquerors, but from neighboring tribes as well. Throughout the following centuries, the Pueblo faced drought and suffered from outsider diseases

5. Charlotte Seoutewa with a

squash blossom necklace.

6. Jeweler Eldrick Seoutewa.

7. An inlay figure by Christie

Latone.

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we’d come. The next morning, we woke to the sound of a hollering train. The sky above us was bright; cracked open like an egg, its yolk of a sun lighting up downtown Gallup in near-blinding brightness. We drove back to Zuni, first stopping at the studio of jeweler Carlton Jamon, which was equal parts display room and workspace. Jamon is known primarily for silver jewelry, and he showed us the tiny silver bears he was working on for a fetish necklace. Our next stop was Veronica Poblano’s studio, but by now we’d learned to take Google Maps with a grain of salt. “Oh yeah,” said Jamon, pointing us in the right direction. “They’re just down the road.”

We were greeted outside by Veronica’s daughter Jovanna Poblano, whose skull-and-bones choker immediately stood apart from more traditional styles we’d seen. “My brother [artist Dylan Poblano] made this.” She laughed. “It’s different, isn’t it?” Stepping inside Veronica’s studio, just a few paces away from her home, we were immediately confronted with all manner of stones and silver. “Mom likes to work on multiple pieces at one time,” explained Jovanna. Nearly every surface of the workspace was covered in a jewelry-lover’s dream: silver housings, bits of glimmering opal, chunks of unpolished turquoise and coral, ready to be transformed into the elegantly modern pieces that have been synonymous with the Poblano name for decades. Veronica’s father Leo was a hugely influential jeweler, whose unusual, overlapping mosaics and diagonal cuts make his work distinctive.

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we’d come. The next morning, we woke to the sound of a hollering train. The sky above us was bright; cracked open like an egg, its yolk of a sun lighting up downtown Gallup in near-blinding brightness. We drove back to Zuni, first stopping at the studio of jeweler Carlton Jamon, which was equal parts display room and workspace. Jamon is known primarily for silver jewelry, and he showed us the tiny silver bears he was working on for a fetish necklace. Our next stop was Veronica Poblano’s studio, but by now we’d learned to take Google Maps with a grain of salt. “Oh yeah,” said Jamon, pointing us in the

We were greeted outside by Veronica’s daughter Jovanna Poblano, whose skull-and-bones choker immediately stood apart from more traditional styles we’d seen. “My brother [artist Dylan Poblano] made this.” She laughed. “It’s different, isn’t it?” Stepping inside Veronica’s studio, just a few paces away from her home, we were immediately confronted with all manner of stones and silver. “Mom likes to work on multiple pieces at one time,” explained Jovanna. Nearly every surface of the workspace was covered in a jewelry-lover’s dream: silver housings, bits of glimmering opal, chunks of unpolished turquoise and coral, ready to be transformed into the elegantly modern pieces that have been synonymous with the Poblano name for decades. Veronica’s father Leo was a hugely influential jeweler, whose unusual,

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“To me,” Steve Begner of Turkey Trading Post said, “Leo Poblano was the best Zuni inlay artist. His jewelry has a sculptural quality to it. He didn’t always cut in straight lines, and his figures were extremely realistic.” Like his friend Leekya Deyuse, Poblano worked for pioneering trader C.G. Wallace, who purchased much of his work.

Silver is synonymous with Southwestern Pueblo jewelry, the basis for concha belt ornaments and elaborate squash blossom necklaces. It wasn’t until the 1860s, however, that the Navajo learned how to manipulate silver from Mexican traders. Silver was sourced from Spanish coins, which were melted into ingots, then hammered into thin sheets for pendant housings and all manner of decorative items. Within a decade or so, the Zuni learned silversmithing from the Navajo—the story goes that a Zuni native named Lanyade traded a horse in exchange for learning how to work silver.

The jewelry of Zuni artists as we know it today hinges largely on their reputation as lapidarists of the highest caliber, and it’s hard to name a single characteristic that’s most striking. The colors are dazzling; the technicality of the pieces is astounding, not to mention the creativity of design, symbolism, and use of material. Perhaps what unites these things more than anything else is stone, whether cut into grain-of-rice-sized bits of coral, polished to a high, gleaming red, or the palm-sized chunks of turquoise adorning a bolo tie ornament. The copper in turquoise gives the gem its shades of blue and green.

Depending on its mine of origin, turquoise can appear powdery blue, sometimes blossomed with pale tan webbing, or, more valuable, indigo—shot through with rhizomic fissures of black, known as the stone’s “matrix.” Many of the Zuni artists I spoke with said the most desirable turquoise comes from the Sleeping Beauty mine, prized for an unsullied blue as cloudless as the desert sky. Virtually matrix-free, it’s less prone to cracking at the veins than its webbed sisters, and lends itself to arresting contrast against silver and stone. For centuries, turquoise has been a signifier of rain. From a purely aesthetic standpoint, the desert’s dominant colors—pale tones of tan and bisque—act as a pleasingly restrained backdrop for the stone’s brilliant coloration.

Zuni inlay is creatively and technically refined. The making of a necklace pendant, for example, begins with a silver housing or bezel, either made by the artist or someone else. Stones are chosen and cut to fit within the confines of the bezel, like a tiny jigsaw puzzle. Usually stones must be cut multiple times, shaped by holding the rock against an electrically powered, revolving emery wheel.

A former officer in the Navy, silverwork artist Christie Latone’s inlay is precise yet deceptively simple. “Growing up with this surrounding me, I didn’t see the whole perspective, I just saw it mostly as a means to make a living, but to be able to take something out of these objects, silver, stones and shells—it’s amazing. To look

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at everything and take it into your work, to sit down, look at your material and just see what you want to create sitting in front of you, some days it’s like you’re possessed.”

Throughout the early part of the 20th century, the Zunis developed a distinctively refined jewelry-making technique, eventually leading to now-cornerstone motifs like needlepoint and petit point styles. Needlepoint refers to thinly cut, tubular, tapered-end stones, designed to be as identical in appearance as possible. Typically monochromatic, the stones are sometimes arranged like shooting rays around a central stone in a Sunface design, and also are used in earrings and other settings. Petit point stonework utilizes ovoid or spherical stones set in neatly arranged patterns; each tiny, usually turquoise nugget supported in its own silver bezel. Zuni inlay jewelry is extraordinary for both its technical prowess and its facility of elaborate, finely rendered compositions of tightly arranged stones, sometimes side-by-side, or else divided into separate chambers by slivers of silver, dividing one stone from its neighbor. Once backed, the mosaic surface is sanded down to create a gleaming, smooth surface.

One of the most striking characteristics of Zuni Pueblo jewelry is its frequent incorporation of brilliant red-orange coral and iridescent abalone shells, materials which obviously aren’t native to the desert Southwest. In a series of videos about the Heard Museum’s renowned C.G. Wallace Native American collection,

curator Deb Slaney explains that coral was introduced by Wallace at his Zuni trading post in the 1920s, where it “became a favorite material, and in some ways may have even replaced traditional prehistoric materials such as argelite and red shale.” Slaney points out the innovation of artists like Annie Gasper, a 1950s jeweler known for her channel inlay and petit point. At one point in the video, Gasper holds up a pair of tiny earrings for the camera. They are miniature stagecoaches, rendered in resplendent turquoise, segmented by skinny channels of silver; they even feature lilliputian wagon wheels that actually roll, making them simultaneously virtuosic and whimsical.

In the end, a story ostensibly about Zuni jewelry turned out to be not about objects at all, but rather about people—people as multi-faceted and inspiring as the jewelry they create. Between bites of pizza on Friday night at Chu Chu’s, I asked Phyllis Coonsis what inspires her pieces, which typically incorporate a broad range of colors, joined in high-intensity but beautiful harmony. “I used only turquoise and coral for many years,” she said, “but now I use various sea shells and semi-precious stones in every color; I try to give it all the rainbow colors.” She looked down at the piece she was wearing, a sunburst-pattern pendant containing a veritable crayon box range of hues, and said with a smiling shrug, “I don’t know. I guess I just make happy jewelry!”

8. Carlton Jamon in

his studio.

9. Veronica Poblano works

on inlay earrings.

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