b. 1946, Santo Domingo (Kewa) Pueblo. Born Angelita Reano. The woman who brought a thousand-year-old technique back to life.
Most artists in this directory extended a living tradition. Angie Reano Owen resurrected a dead one. On a trip to Tucson she stood in front of precontact mosaic inlay — shell and stone laid up in the way Ancestral Pueblo and Hohokam artisans had done it a thousand years ago, a technique that had fallen out of active practice — and she decided to bring it back. She worked out her own version, bonding thin slices of shell and stone with a family adhesive known only to the Reanos, and in doing so reconnected Pueblo jewelry to its own deep past. The girl who once sold Thunderbird necklaces on the steps of the Palace of the Governors became the artist credited with reviving Southwestern mosaic inlay.
She was born in 1946 at Santo Domingo — now officially Kewa — Pueblo, the New Mexico village long renowned for heishi, the fine hand-rolled shell and stone beadwork. Jewelry was the family trade: her mother, Clara Lovato Reano, was a working jeweler, and Angie was one of eight children who grew up making and selling. After graduating Albuquerque High in 1965, she was turning out Thunderbird-motif necklaces for the tourist market — the family sold on the portal of the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, the historic vendors' arcade Native artisans still work today. Then came Tucson, and the ancient mosaics, and everything changed. She married Don Owen and built a body of work that grew, by the 1980s, into elaborate mosaic patterning wrapped around complex organic forms — what one scholar called "an unconventional integration of various prehistoric and postmodern design elements."
Owen's medium is not silver but mosaic: thin cut slices of turquoise, coral, tiger cowrie, and other shell, arranged into pattern and landscape and set directly onto a shell or organic base — no metal framework doing the structural work. That's what distinguishes it from Zuni channel inlay, where stones sit in carved silver channels; hers is built up stone-to-stone on the shell itself, then sanded smooth. It is the Ancestral Pueblo and Hohokam method, revived and carried forward in a living hand. (No personal maker's-mark stamp is documented for her — consistent with shell-and-stone mosaic work, where attribution rests on gallery provenance rather than a struck metal hallmark. We'd rather name that than guess.)
In 1995 Owen was named the Ronald and Susan Dubin Artist Fellow at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe — a serious scholarly institution whose Indian Arts Research Center holds her work — and she has taken multiple Best of Division awards at the Santa Fe Indian Market and the Heard Museum Guild Fair. Her jewelry is held in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. And she built more than a career: she taught the technique to her brother Joe, her sister-in-law, and her children Rena, Dean, and Donna — the Reano Owen family is now a mosaic-inlay dynasty of its own.
Know more about Angie? Contact T.Skies.