Why he matters
Fifth Avenue’s jewelry cases are full of Native work set with gold, coral and lapis in bold sculptural blocks, and most shoppers assume that look is ancient. It isn’t. It was worked out in the mid-1950s by a Hopi potter in a small studio a few steps from Scottsdale Road. Charles Loloma came to town in 1954 to sell pottery, and within a year or two he had started making the jewelry that broke Native design out of the trading-post mold.
He was traditional and modern at once: a Hotevilla man who kept the Hopi ceremonial calendar all his life, and an Alfred-trained craftsman who treated stone like a sculptor. The work he began on Fifth Avenue went on to museums, to diplomatic gifts and to a generation of Native jewelers who still work in his idiom.
Where to find his mark today
Kiva Craft Center. The guide to the lost center where Loloma had his studio, and where it stood on the Fifth Avenue curve.
Fifth Avenue shops. The avenue’s Native-jewelry dealers are the living trade the Kiva studios started. Ask for inlay work in the Loloma tradition.
Faust Gallery. A gallery built around contemporary Native jewelry by named artists, the lineage Loloma opened.
The street he worked on
Loloma arrived during the few years when downtown Scottsdale decided it was an arts colony. The Arizona Craft Center had burned in 1950, the newly incorporated town had laid out Fifth Avenue as a curving shopping street, and Lloyd Kiva New was gathering working artisans around his own fashion studio. Loloma and his wife Otellie were among the first to move in.
The Navajo side of the same moment was the White Hogan, where silversmiths were stripping stamped ornament down to clean lines. Walk both stories in one afternoon with the Fifth Avenue district guide, then compare the cases at Gilbert Ortega Galleries on Main Street, where Hopi overlay and Zuni inlay sit side by side.
The full story
Charles Loloma was born in 1921 in Hotevilla, on the Hopi Third Mesa. He went to Phoenix Indian School, worked on mural reproductions for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, and served in the Army through World War II, much of it in the Aleutian Islands. After the war he and his wife, Otellie, a Hopi potter, used the GI Bill to study ceramics at the School for American Craftsmen at Alfred University in New York.
In 1954 the couple opened a pottery shop in Scottsdale. The 1950s were the decade the town turned its downtown into an arts district, and the Lolomas became among the first tenants of Lloyd Kiva New’s Kiva Craft Center on Fifth Avenue. Their Lolomaware pottery sold well, and Loloma also taught classes at Arizona State and the University of Arizona. But from about 1955 he was making jewelry, first tufa-cast silver and then pieces nobody had seen from a Hopi bench: gold, coral, turquoise, lapis and pearls set in stacked, high-relief inlay, sometimes with a stone hidden on the inside of a bracelet where only the wearer would find it. He called those his inner gems. In the 1960s he took first prize at the Scottsdale National Indian Arts Exhibition seven years running.
In 1962 New left to co-found the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, and Loloma went with him to teach. By the middle of the 1960s he had returned to Hotevilla and built a home and studio on the edge of the village, where he worked for the rest of his life and served as a religious leader in the community. His jewelry went to museums and, through Lyndon Johnson’s White House, to foreign heads of state. He died in 1991.
Scottsdale holds none of his buildings. What it holds is the trade. The boomtown era on Fifth Avenue produced a jewelry idiom that dealers on the same street still sell, and the gold-and-inlay look in their cases goes back to Loloma’s studio in the Kiva Craft Center.