Charles Loloma: Artist and Innovator

At the June 2015 ROADSHOW in Tucson, [Douglas Deihl](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/appraisers/douglas-deihl), of Boston’s Skinner Auctioneers, estimated a Charles Loloma ring, bracelet, and limited-edition print would bring between $25,200 and $32,600 at auction. But how much do you know about this groundbreaking Native artist?

A thick silver bracelet made up of dark blue, light blue, and orange triangles.

Apr 4, 2016

BY Ben Phelan

Although he would eventually play a large role in bringing Native American arts and crafts into the mainstream of American culture, Charles Loloma (1921-1991) was initially rejected by the Native American arts establishment. It’s pretty, he was told, again and again, when he presented his work to Native American curators. But it’s not Indian. As a Hopi Indian, Loloma produced art that partook of some elements that were long established in the Native American tradition, rejected others, and brought in strange new influences never before seen. That the pieces of jewelry appraised at the Tucson event may not look particularly transgressive of Native conventions (to the untrained eye at least) is a testament to Loloma’s deep influence on the culture. Our own expectations of what is, and what is not, Native art have been conditioned by Charles Loloma.

Our own expectations of what is, and what is not, Native art have been conditioned by Charles Loloma

As explained by Diana Pardue, in Contemporary Southwestern Jewelry, Charles Loloma can take more credit than any other artist for changing the look of contemporary Native American jewelry. Before Loloma introduced a range of new techniques and materials, Native artists tended to work from a tightly prescribed menu: jet and turquoise, coral and shells, silver. Over his career, Loloma integrated a modern sensibility with traditional Native lines, incorporating such unusual materials as lapis lazuli, the bright purple sugilite and charolite, malachite, tourmaline, and even fossil ivory harvested from the long-dead corpses of woolly mammoths.

Appraisal: Charles Loloma Collection, ca. 1975

Transcript

GUEST: A very dear friend of mine, she and her husband were close friends of Charles Loloma. And I remember Charles driving up in his Rolls Royce and parking it in their driveway. He spent a lot of time with this family. They became very, very close. And he decided to make pieces of jewelry for my dear friend-- a lot of pieces of jewelry. And actually made the pieces at her house, some of them.

APPRAISER: And you got these pieces from your friend?

GUEST: I bought them from my friend. She had a lot, and she, I think, gave me first opportunity. And I knew that he was an important artist at the time. I'm sure that she gave a dear friend a deal.

APPRAISER: What did she charge you for them? I'm curious.

GUEST: For both of them it was $3,500, no tax, because it was just between the two of us.

APPRAISER: How long ago was this?

GUEST: 30 years ago-- well before his passing. And she actually gave this piece to me.

APPRAISER: The print-- it's a very nice print.

GUEST: Thanks.

APPRAISER: Well, I'm sure you're aware that Charles Loloma's pretty big news these days. He's really... he's been selling at really good prices. Now, your examples, the bracelet, it's not a classic Charles Loloma piece. He was a Hopi artist, and he was known for his cluster work with precious and semiprecious stones. So this is kind of unusual, this bracelet. It's got two really beautiful turquoise settings in gold on kind of a mottled silver background. The bracelet has the inscription "Loloma" on the inside, which is how he signed his bracelets. The ring is a beautiful gold ring, once again with a really nice stone. I'm not 100% sure which mine this stone would have come, but knowing...

GUEST: I think they were from different mines.

APPRAISER: Yeah, and knowing Charles Loloma, they were the best available at the time. He used a lot of precious stones in his jewelry. He'd even use diamonds occasionally.

GUEST: She kept those pieces.

APPRAISER: Ah, she kept those pieces.

GUEST: Yeah.

APPRAISER: So you bought these about 30 years ago. I think they look like the type of work he was doing in the '60s and '70s. I think in today's auction world, the ring would probably bring about $4,000 to $6,000. I think the print would probably bring about $1,200 to $1,600 at auction. But I think the bracelet would probably bring $20,000 to $25,000 in today's market.

GUEST (laughing): Wow. Oh, gee.

Loloma got an early start. When only 17 years old, Loloma was tapped by Fred Kabotie, an older, more established Hopi artist, to help paint a mural for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, in San Francisco. Although Loloma was a skilled visual artist, as evidenced by the Tucson print, his primary interest at the time was ceramics. Right away, even at a young age, Loloma showed that he had little time for observing strict boundaries between artistic traditions; he took his formal training in ceramics at the School for American Craftsmen at Alfred University, a course of study totally distinct from the Native traditions in which he was raised.

As his skills flourished and evolved, Loloma discovered that while he was a gifted potter and ceramicist, it was in jewelry-making that he would make his mark, though his innovations were not warmly received by some other Native artists, not at first. One technique that was at odds with Hopi tradition can clearly be seen in the bracelet appraised in the segment: The rough, irregular surface of the piece is created not by traditional metalworking techniques, but by tufa-casting, or pouring molten metal into a carved-out length of volcanic stone. Ironically, this signature technique has made Loloma’s work susceptible to counterfeiting, particularly as its value has risen. Because the textures produced by tufa-casting are unpredictable and irregular, there is little continuity from one piece to the next. It can take a skilled eye, and iron-clad provenance, to demonstrate that a Loloma piece is really by Loloma.

Later on, Loloma began to group the gems, minerals, and mineraloids adorning his bracelets into rectilinear groups, more reminiscent of a Mondrian canvas than of a piece of Native American craft. Yet in the uneven edges produced by the juxtaposition of these stones, a sensitive eye could make out the mesas, bluffs and canyons of the Hopi country in which Loloma was raised. Often, Loloma would decorate the inside of the bracelet — the part held against the skin — with lovelier designs than appeared to the outside observer. “I like to think of the linings as the soul,” he explained. “A piece of art should be full of surprises, like a person. When you look inside, you should find excitement. If there is beauty in a piece of art, a person can absorb it and become more beautiful.”

When he was growing up on the Hopi reservation in the 1920s, Loloma’s father was a weaver and his mother a basket maker. Those media have found a place in the modern art world now, but were little valued at the time. His parents did not live to see their crafts bestowed mainstream acceptance, but Loloma was luckier.

Native American designs, largely thanks to Loloma, have come to feature prominently across the arts, even in such distant media as fashion. In the 1970s, as Diana Pardue points out, the elite couture houses Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren notably incorporated into their clothing an aesthetic that was clearly Native American, and clearly inspired by Loloma. And so ironically, at the beginning of Loloma's career, critics had told him that his art wasn't "Indian enough"; yet when his vision was transformed and imported into the fashion world, it came to typify Native American-ness. That vision then cycled back into "traditional" Native American art, and the world that had pronounced Loloma's work pretty but essentially foreign found itself transformed. And transformation is a hallmark of all true artistry.

See the full segment page for this item in our Appraisal Archive