What it’s actually like
Walk east along First Avenue from Scottsdale Road and, just past the storefronts, there is a building that people in the Native art world still call by a name that has not been on the sign for twenty years. The White Hogan was a silver shop, a workshop and, for a stretch of the 1950s, the most important address in Navajo silversmithing. From its benches Kenneth Begay and the Kee brothers pushed Navajo silver away from the heavy, stamped, turquoise-laden style of the trading posts and toward something modern: sleek forms, clean lines, subtle textures, the parallel-bar motif that became the shop’s signature. Begay is now called the Father of Modern Navajo Jewelry, and this is where he did the work.
The shop was born in Flagstaff in May 1946, a partnership between a non-Native couple, John and Virginia Bonnell, and two Navajo silversmiths, Begay and his cousin Allen Kee. In 1950 it moved to Scottsdale, a town about to reinvent itself as an arts colony, and it fit the moment exactly. The Arizona Craft Center had just burned, the artisans were scattering into downtown storefronts, Lloyd Kiva New was building the Kiva Craft Center on Fifth Avenue, and Charles Loloma was about to reinvent Hopi jewelry a few blocks away. The White Hogan was the Navajo strand of that revolution, and it lasted the longest: fifty-six years in Scottsdale and three generations of Native silversmiths before it closed in August 2006.
The building survives, now Fashion by Robert Black, a vintage couture house that has kept the landmark intact. The jewelry survives in museums and in collections that rarely sell.
What it sold
Silver, made on the premises, in a style nobody else had. Bracelets, rings, necklaces and buckles in Begay’s smooth modern manner, often with the parallel bars and with turquoise used sparingly as an accent rather than a load. And, unusually for a Native silver shop, flatware and hollowware: bowls, spoons, serving pieces and tableware in sterling, the kind of object that turned a jewelry customer into a lifelong patron and turned Navajo silverwork into something a Scottsdale winter resident could set on a dinner table.
Where it stood and what’s there now
The surviving landmark is the White Hogan building at 7144 East First Avenue, on the north side of the street between Scottsdale Road and the Marshall Way galleries, now home to Fashion by Robert Black. Sources differ on whether the shop’s earliest Scottsdale years were spent on Main Street or on First Avenue, so treat the First Avenue building as its long-term home rather than necessarily its first, and treat anyone who tells you exactly where it started in 1950 with polite suspicion. The Old Town on foot note passes the door; the Old Town guide covers the district around it.
The block has eaten well for a long time. Arcadia Farms Cafe holds the western end of First Avenue, Hula’s Modern Tiki the eastern end, and the Sugar Bowl, pink at Scottsdale Road and First since 1958, was serving sundaes across the street for the shop’s entire modern era.
The successors worth a visit
For the lineage, the Native-jewelry rooms of Fifth Avenue and Main Street are where a Begay-era piece might surface and where the modern Navajo style he started is still made. Sewell’s Indian Arts on Fifth Avenue predates the White Hogan’s arrival in Scottsdale and has been dealing Navajo silver since 1932; Waddell Gallery on Main Street handles vintage and museum-grade work and lends to museum shows; Gilbert Ortega Galleries covers the broad trade. For the building itself, Fashion by Robert Black is open largely by appointment, and a visit to the couture house is also a visit to the last standing home of modern Navajo silver.
How it got here
Navajo silversmithing in the 1940s was a trading-post economy: heavy stamped work, big stones, made to a formula that Route 66 tourists recognized. The White Hogan Silver Shop, opened in Flagstaff in May 1946 by John and Virginia Bonnell with Kenneth Begay and Allen Kee as partners, set out to do something else. It was a joint venture between non-Native owners and Native silversmiths, unusual enough on its own, and it employed the brothers George, Ivan and Allen Kee and their cousin Begay at the bench, where Begay would remain from 1946 to 1964.
In 1950 the shop moved to Scottsdale. The 1950s were the decade the newly incorporated town decided it was an arts colony, and the White Hogan arrived at the same moment as the makers who would define it: the Arizona Craft Center’s artisans scattered by the 1950 fire, Lloyd Kiva New with his Kiva label, Charles Loloma reinventing Hopi jewelry. The shop became a creative hub, and from its benches Begay produced the work that made his name: sleek forms, clean lines, subtle textures, parallel bars in place of stamped ornament, silver that looked as though it belonged in a modern house rather than a curio cabinet. The Arizona Republic covered the shop in 1953. In 1956 LIFE magazine ran ‘Sands of Desert Turn Gold’, a feature on Lloyd Kiva New and the White Hogan artists, and for a moment the most exciting Native design in America was being made on a couple of streets in a town of a few thousand people.
Begay left the bench in 1964, and the shop carried on through the 1960s and beyond with the next generations of Native silversmiths, three in all, while the Scottsdale around it turned from arts colony to gallery town to resort city. It outlasted the Kiva Craft Center by four decades. It closed in August 2006, after fifty-six years in Scottsdale, at a point when the trade it had modernized was being carried on by dozens of dealers and hundreds of smiths who had learned, directly or not, from what came out of its doors.
Begay died in 1977; his title, the Father of Modern Navajo Jewelry, was conferred by the museum world that now holds his work. The building on First Avenue, kept as a landmark by the couture house that occupies it, is the last physical trace in Old Town of the shop that changed what Navajo silver could look like.