What it’s actually like
Fifth Avenue’s jewelry cases today 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 was on this street. The Kiva Craft Center was the complex that Lloyd Kiva New built on the new Fifth Avenue curve in the mid-1950s — his own fashion studio and shop at its center, working studios for other craftspeople around it — and it sold the Southwest to Neiman Marcus and Vogue from a Scottsdale side street.
New was Cherokee, Chicago-trained, and had arrived in Scottsdale with the postwar wave of artists that produced the Arizona Craft Center. When that co-op burned in 1950 and the town laid out Fifth Avenue as a shopping street, he built the permanent version of the same idea under his own name. The Kiva label — hand-screened fabrics, handbags, resort wear in Native-derived patterns — went national. So did his most famous tenant: Charles Loloma, the Hopi artist whose gold, inlay and sculptural forms remade Native jewelry from a studio at the center.
Then in 1962 New left for Santa Fe to co-found the Institute of American Indian Arts, the school that would shape Native art for the next half century, and the center gradually became a row of ordinary Fifth Avenue shops. Its address is now just part of the Fifth Avenue guide. Its legacy is every serious jewelry case on the street.
What it was like inside
A working village on a shopping street. Studios opened onto the walk so visitors could watch the printing, the leatherwork, the silversmithing; the shop in front sold the results at prices that assumed the buyer had a winter home nearby. The Kiva line was the anchor — handbags, skirts and shirts in New’s screened designs — and around it rotated the makers the center attracted: jewelers, potters, weavers, painters, in a scene that put Scottsdale on the national craft map for the first time.
Where it stood and what’s there now
The center stood on Fifth Avenue west of Scottsdale Road, on the curve the town laid out in the early 1950s; accounts place it among the storefronts that still line the avenue’s south side, and the buildings were absorbed into the street’s ordinary retail after New’s departure rather than demolished. Nothing on the avenue today carries the Kiva name. The Old Town on foot note walks the block; the Bronze Horse Fountain at Fifth and Marshall Way, installed in 1989, is the meeting point a few doors down.
What is there now is the trade the center started: the Native-silver and turquoise shops of Fifth Avenue, the galleries of Marshall Way, and Craftsman Court, the 1955 lanes built the same year for the same generation of makers.
The successors worth a visit
For the jewelry lineage, the Fifth Avenue dealers and Gilbert Ortega Galleries on Main Street are where Hopi overlay and inlay work in the Loloma tradition can still be bought from people who know what they are selling. For the working-studio idea, Cattle Track on the canal is the last compound in the city where it runs daily. For the design history, the Heard Museum in Phoenix holds work by both New and Loloma and tells the story this page can only sketch. And for dinner on the street where it happened: FnB in Craftsman Court, or the ghost of Trader Vic’s, which opened at the corner in 1962, the year New left.
How it got here
Lloyd Kiva New came to Scottsdale in the late 1940s as part of the postwar arrival of artists that the 1940s history records — a Cherokee designer who had studied art in Chicago, taught, and decided that Native design belonged in fashion rather than in museum cases. He began producing hand-screened textiles and leather goods under the Kiva name in the years 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. The newly incorporated town laid out Fifth Avenue as a curving shopping street for its western-resort pitch, and in 1955 — the year Craftsman Court was built for the displaced co-op members — New built the Kiva Craft Center on the avenue: his own studio and shop at the heart, working studios for other craftspeople around it. It was the Craft Center’s cooperative idea rebuilt as a branded enterprise, and it worked on a scale the co-op never reached. Kiva handbags and fashions sold through Neiman Marcus and other national stores; the label was photographed in the fashion magazines; and a Scottsdale side street had, for the first time, a national reputation.
The center’s most consequential tenant was Charles Loloma. A Hopi potter and painter who turned to jewelry in the 1950s, Loloma took a studio at the Kiva center and began the work — gold instead of silver, inlaid stone in sculptural settings, forms that owed as much to modernism as to tradition — that made him the most influential Native jeweler of the century. By the early 1960s he had returned to Hotevilla on the Hopi mesas, but the revolution had started on Fifth Avenue.
In 1962 New left too, to co-found the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe with the same conviction that had built the Kiva center: that Native artists should be trained as artists and sold as designers. 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. The Fifth Avenue jewelry trade, the town’s art-district identity and, at some remove, the modern Native art world all descend from a few storefronts on the curve — which is more than most shopping centers can claim, and more than anyone on the avenue today remembers.