Why he matters
Fifth Avenue’s jewelry cases are the visible end of a story most shoppers never hear. For a few years in the late 1950s the most important Native American design studio in the country sat on this street, and Lloyd Kiva New built it. A Cherokee designer trained in Chicago, he believed Native design belonged in fashion rather than in museum cases, and he proved it from Scottsdale: Kiva handbags and resort wear in Neiman Marcus, in the fashion magazines, and in LIFE.
He also gathered people. The Kiva Craft Center put working artisans in studios that opened onto the walk, and its most famous tenant, the Hopi jeweler Charles Loloma, started the revolution in modern Native jewelry there. When New left in 1962 to co-found the Institute of American Indian Arts, he took the same conviction to the institution that shaped Native art for the next half century.
Where to find his mark today
Kiva Craft Center. The guide to the lost center, including where it stood on the Fifth Avenue curve west of Scottsdale Road.
Fifth Avenue shops. The avenue’s Native-silver and turquoise dealers are the living trade the center started.
Sewell’s Indian Arts. A Native arts dealer founded in 1932, before Fifth Avenue itself was laid out, and still selling the work a few doors from where New built.
The street he helped build
New’s Scottsdale was a small town reinventing itself as an arts colony. The Arizona Craft Center, a cooperative for silversmiths, potters and weavers founded in 1947, gathered the town’s makers until it burned in 1950. The newly incorporated town then laid out Fifth Avenue as a curving shopping street, and in 1955 Craftsman Court went up for the displaced co-op members while New built his own center on the avenue.
The Navajo strand of the same movement was the White Hogan, the silversmiths’ shop that shared the 1956 LIFE feature with New and outlasted his center by four decades. The Fifth Avenue district guide covers the street as it is now.
The full story
Lloyd Kiva New was born in Oklahoma in 1916, studied art in Chicago, and came to Scottsdale in the late 1940s with the postwar wave of artists recorded in the 1940s chapter. He began producing hand-screened textiles and leather goods under the Kiva name while the Arizona Craft Center was gathering the town’s makers, and when the co-op burned in 1950 he was among the artisans who needed a permanent home.
The 1950s gave him one. In 1955 he built the Kiva Craft Center on Fifth Avenue: his own studio and shop at the heart, working studios for other craftspeople around it, and a front shop selling to buyers with winter homes nearby. It was the Craft Center’s cooperative idea rebuilt as a branded business, and it worked at a scale the co-op never reached. Kiva handbags and fashions sold through Neiman Marcus and other national stores, and in 1956 LIFE ran “Sands of Desert Turn Gold” on New and the White Hogan artists.
The center’s most important tenant was Charles Loloma, a Hopi potter and painter who turned to jewelry in the 1950s and began working with gold, inlaid stone and sculptural settings at his Kiva studio. By the early 1960s he had gone back to Hotevilla on the Hopi mesas, but the change in Native jewelry had started on Fifth Avenue.
In 1962 New left too, to co-found the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, which he later led as president. Without him the center’s studios turned over to conventional retail, and by the end of the 1960s the name had faded from the street. He died in 2002. Fifth Avenue’s jewelry trade, the town’s art-district identity, and a good part of the modern Native art world all trace back to those few storefronts on the curve.