PRESS

• NICHE Magazine, Winter 2006

• W. Jewelry, Spring 2006

Best Western
By Kevin West

Download .pdf of this article with photos by James Merrell.

It’s lunchtime at Santacafe, and even though the Santa Fe tourist tide is at a seasonal ebb—it’s a weekday in February—the room is bustling with members of the local millionaire set. Wellpadded men in cowboy boots discuss real-estate deals, while a handsome young couple feed their toddler bits of organic winter squash, and a pair of older women, both with striking silver hair and allblack clothes, sip herbal tea and lean toward each other in conversation. The room could almost be Da Silvano’s in New York or London’s Caprice—classic lunch spots for the rich and social—except for the whitewashed adobe walls and the sun-bleached deer skull over the kiva fireplace.

In one corner of the room, jeweler Paula Crevoshay and her husband, Martin Bell, are spreading a fortune in jewelry across the white tablecloth with no concern for the crowd around them. Crevoshay is an exuberant and expressive woman, and she seems about to levitate with excitement as she unpacks suede cases full of such intensely colored gems as cherry opal, green beryl, citrine and purple spinel. The unusual stones dazzle enough in the New Mexico sunlight to make you squint.

“All gems are precious,” Crevoshay says as she plucks rings and pins and pendants, some worth as much as $250,000, from their cases.“I consider them the tangible light of the goddess.”

Such occasional flights of fancy are par for the course in Santa Fe, but that doesn’t mean Crevoshay’s work can be dismissed as New Age hokum. (Although there is one pin that features a translucent stone carved with the kingly profile of Lythos, whom she describes as the “male aspect of Spirit.”) Oprah Winfrey and Mary J. Blige are among her clientele, and her painterly use of color and idiosyncratic choice of stones makes Crevoshay seem like the JAR of the New Age set. (She has even made the butterfly, a JAR specialty, something of her signature design—although in these parts the winged insect is known by its Spanish name, mariposa.)

Santa Fe, which was founded as the capital of New Spain in 1610, has been a popular destination ever since the railroads arrived at the turn of the 20th century and disgorged Eastern tourists with an urge to splurge on the perfect souvenir of the Southwest. An outdoor Indian jewelry bazaar underneath the portal of the Governor’s Palace on Santa Fe’s main plaza has operated daily for almost a century, and the annual Indian Market, which attracts Native American craftsmen, is one of the city’s top tourist draws.

A brief stroll around town reveals a staggering bounty of jewelry at every price and level of sophistication. Custom bootmaker Back at the Ranch offers massive skull-and-crossbones belt buckles by Doug Magnus, the Chrome Hearts of Santa Fe, while up on Canyon Road— a main gallery thoroughfare—a quirky Western-wear store called Nathalie sells both cowboy belt buckles and Indian rings. Owner Nathalie Kent, a former French Vogue editor, practically defines Santa Fe eclecticism when she piles on an antique turquoise bracelet, an Hermès toggle bracelet and a beaded cuff with a portrait of her daughter by Choctaw artisan Marcus Amerman.

Much of Santa Fe jewelry shares a few general characteristics,whatever its maker’s stylistic approach. It tends to be handmade on a small scale using a range of old-fashioned techniques, such as casting and granulation. Many local jewelers favor semiprecious stones from the region, such as turquoise and opals, as well as other opaque stones, cabochons and lesser-known mineralogical specialties. And, in a town where anybody in Birkenstocks will call himself an “artist,” creativity and self-expression are the rule.

Antique Indian jewelry is of course a genre unto itself —and a confusing one at that—providing the essential backdrop for Native American jewelers working today. The Rainbow Man, with its flavor of an old-time trading post, has one of the best selections in town. (Clients include Tom Ford,who buys gifts there; Goldie Hawn; Kate Hudson; and Ali MacGraw.) One vitrine in the store holds the holy grail for serious collectors: a $21,000 museumquality Navajo concho belt from the 1890s, known as a “first phase” belt because it represents the earliest stage of classic Navajo silversmithing. “The first-phase belts were melted-down coins,”explains Debbie Cox, daughter of Rainbow Man owners Marianne and Bob Kapoun, whose sexy looks and laidback manner make her seem as if she were plucked from an Eagles concert, circa 1973. Cox explains that silver jewelry didn’t exist in the Southwest until the late 1800s, when Spanish silversmiths gave the Navajo the steel tools necessary to work metal. While the earliest Southwestern silverwork exhibits a simplicity of design, Navajo and Zuni jewelry grew progressively gaudier throughout the Thirties, Forties and Fifties, to suit tourists’ extravagant taste.

A seismic shift occurred in the Sixties, however. Charles Loloma, an Arizona Hopi who died in 1991, revived traditional techniques and applied them with innovation and flair. He created groundbreaking geometric work, traveled to Paris to great acclaim as early as 1963 and revolutionized the entire field. (The Heard Museum in Phoenix is currently exhibiting a retrospective that began at Santa Fe’s Wheelright Museum of the American Indian.) At the nearby Price-Dewey Galleries, which combines abstract Native American textiles with 20th-century modernis furniture, visitors can examine Loloma’s work as well as work from his niece Verma Nequatewa.

“Loloma is the reason why contemporary Native American jewelry has gone the way it’s gone,” says Victoria Price, daughter of actor (and noted collector of Native American materials) Vincent Price.“He is thepredecessor to everyone you see out there.”

Among Loloma’s spiritual heirs is Angie ReanoOwen,a jeweler from the Santo Domingo Pueblo30 minutes south of town—and worlds away fromthe tourist path around Santa Fe’s central plaza.Owen’s living room walls are chockablock with col-orful hand-woven rugs and shelves full of pottery,but Santo Domingo Pueblo is best known for its jew-elry,and Owen is one of its masters.“Here,if youcome from a jeweler family,you’re a jeweler,”saysOwen.“Our family,the Reanos,are beadmakers.”

Santo Domingo jewelry has its antecedents inthe prehistoric work of the Anasazi Indians wholived in New Mexico a thousand years ago.They strung necklaces together with turquoise nuggets and “heishi”beads made from seashells,both impor-tant pre-Columbian trade commodities.As a girl,Owen learned their techniques,and today tubs of rough turquoise and spiny oyster crowd a messytable in her kitchen workshop,while baskets of cornand green chiles sit on the floor.A few family mem-bers assist her with her limited output of naturalshells inlaid with colorful stones.

“The phone rings and rings,”reports Owen,whosays her dealer in Australia keeps calling for more.“Idon’t answer it.I have to work!”
Another Native American silversmith who is defining the contemporary edge of traditional design is Anthony Lovato, who also lives on Santo Domingo Pueblo. He uses a Loloma technique known as tufa casting to create one-of-a-kind bracelets and pendants with an abstract quality that appeals to the modern eye.

Lovato’s work sells at an edgy boutique called Block Mercantile near the railyard, a formerly industrial area that boutique owner Clarissa Block refers to as “the SoHo of Santa Fe” because of its proximity to contemporary galleries and the arts space Site Santa Fe. Santa Fe is, as many locals will proudly announce, the third largest art market in America, but one defined by art that is, to put it kindly, of regional interest. In recent years, however, gallerists Laura Carpenter and James Kelly (who works part of the year with Matthew Marks in New York and is building a new gallery space in the railyard) have been instrumental in attracting artists of international stature. Site Santa Fe devoted its major winter show, for instance, to Cai Guo- Qiang, the celebrated Chinese artist known for his work with gunpowder. The talk of the town, however, is a new glass-and-concrete pavilion built by Mickey and Jeannie Klein to house their dazzling collection which includes site-important, sitespecific works by James Turrell, Olafur Eliasson, Richard Tuttle and Fred Sandback. The house will be open as part of this summer’s sixth Site Santa Fe biennial.

Still, for most visitors, if there is one emblem of the Southwest, it is turquoise. Native Americans have been mining the mineral, properly described as cuprous aluminum phosphate, since prehistoric times. It typically occurs in small deposits, and many of the historically important mines were played out
by the 1970s. Only 200 pounds of Lander Blue—a stone the intense blue color of Lake Tahoe with a dense spiderweb of darker veins or “matrix”—came from a now-depleted mine in Nevada, giving it the almost mythic allure of rare Golconda diamonds. Prices for other gem-quality turquoise now soar to tens of thousands of dollars a pound.

The contemporary master of turquoise jewelry is arguably Scott Diffrient, who lives just southeast of Santa Fe in the dusty one-church town of Galisteo, a small former ranching community that has largely avoided commercial development. Unlike the mountain villages to Santa Fe’s north, Galisteo sits on the edge of an expansive plain where the domed sky is propped up only by the distant Sangre de Cristo mountains. Near here, artist Bruce Nauman and painter Susan Rothenberg have a ranch, and Tom Ford has commissioned his mausoleum to be built by Japanese architect Tadao Ando.

“Basically I’m a lapidary artist,” says Diffrient with a gentle demeanor that suggests years of quiet work apart from the world. “I cut my own
stones. I never wanted to be restricted by another person’s cutting. Most jewelers don’t cut stones, so their design potential is limited. It kind of sets the parameters.”

Diffrient’s work revives many traditional Native American styles, and he admits that the proximity to Pueblo culture drew him to Santa Fe 30 years ago. Even with the benefit of the power tools he uses, Diffrient says he will spend as much as 150 hours—a month’s work—on a single necklace of carefully shaped beads and pendants.

Still, for every artisan working in a traditional mode, there is likely to be another who cleaves to a more modern style. Urban refugees have had a profound impact on northern New Mexico for decades, ever since the arrival of bold and free-spirited women such as wealthy widow Mabel Dodge Luhan, who was perhaps the first 20th-century tastemaker to decamp to the region, and Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rodgers. Luhan brought her friend Georgia O’Keeffe to New Mexico for the first time, while Rodgers assembled a remarkable collection of Native American jewelry in the Forties and Fifties, which is now on display at the Millicent Rodgers Museum in Taos .

One doyenne of the local jewelry scene, Luna Felix, landed in Santa Fe in 1986 and realized she had found her home among such free spirits. Felix, a kooky personality who had been living in New York heard from an American friend that Santa Fe was “cool,” and she showed up. She now scoffs at the inadequacy of her friend’s long-ago description.

“In Europe we are not afraid of eloquence,” says the booming Felix, who was born in Morocco, raised in Europe and speaks a number of languages loudly. “I saw the chocolate mountains, the piñon, the infinite sky, the plaza, the beauty of it all. It gave me a cosmic Mohawk, which is what I say when all the hair on your head stands on end.”

Felix’s bold work evokes some of the region’s rough edges and natural wonders: She will set Nevada opals, uncut diamonds and even iridescent scarab beetles into 22-karat gold to create pieces for wealthy white witches everywhere. Her gallery, just off the plaza, also carries the work of Laila and Ion Ionescu, two transplants from Transylvania who create their own distinctive work at side-byside work benches in their private studio.

Hillary and Somers Randolph are another husband-and-wife team who approach jewelry from a fine-arts perspective. Somers is a sculptor who carves abstract shapes from massive blocks of Italian marble and also likes to whittle small pieces from soapstone.

“When I moved in with Somers, I found a trunk full of hundreds of these tiny sculptures,” recalls Hillary, who was a publicist for Ralph Lauren and Wathne in New York before moving to Santa Fe to marry Somers in 1999. “And I said, ‘I want to wear one.’ Somers said, ‘They’re baby powder — soapstone—they’ll crumble.’” Instead Hillary selected her dozen favorite “whittlings” and had them cast as jewelry. The collection now includes some 130 styles that are cast at the same Rhode Island foundry as Tiffany’s Elsa Peretti collection.

But perhaps the most urbane work being created in Santa Fe today comes from the spotless studio of Denise Betesh, a minimalist jeweler with a taste for contemporary art. Fifteen years ago, she also left New York for New Mexico in search of a new life.

“I wanted to start from scratch,” says Betesh, who nonetheless still opts for a Manhattan uniform of black on black. “I was about 35, and it was a good time to come here and start all over. It worked perfectly from day one.”

Today Betesh and her partner, hairstylist Ken Terry, live in a snappy modernist house by local architect Trey Jordan. It’s a vision of Santa Fe style more attuned to the spiritually charged minimalist art of Agnes Martin, a longtime New Mexico resident before her death in 2004, than to the pink adobe kitsch of the Eighties. Betesh works with 22-karat gold, stones that echo the dusty colors of the landscape and labor-intensive techniques such as granulation and fusion. Like many jewelers in the region, Betesh eschews mass production— she has just one assistant in her studio-cum-guest bedroom—and she follows her own creative impulse with little regard for convention. “What Santa Fe gives me most is the opportunity to create,” she says. “It’s fairly uncluttered and peaceful. Santa Fe is nicknamed ‘the city different.’ And it is a little different. That’s why I’m here.”