b. 1959. The Southwestern jeweler who works like a Paris goldsmith.
Most Southwestern silver is built flat — overlay on a sheet, stone set into a bezel, read from the front. Charles Supplee builds his the other way: in three dimensions, with movement, gold and stone assembled the way a European fine-jeweler assembles a ring. That difference has a direct source, and it isn't Hopi tradition alone. It's a two-year apprenticeship under a French master goldsmith — Old World technique, transplanted to Arizona.
He was born in 1959 to a Hopi mother and a French father, a schoolteacher, and grew up on the Navajo Reservation. His father, a hobbyist jeweler, taught him silverwork basics at home — that's the real start, not a trip abroad. After high school he moved to Scottsdale to work as a bench silversmith at the Arizona Turquoise and Silver Company.
The turn came in the 1980s, when Supplee apprenticed for two years under Pierre Touraine. Touraine was a French-born goldsmith who had made jewelry for European celebrities in 1930s Paris, emigrated to the United States in 1938, worked for Harry Winston in New York, then settled in the Southwest — where, in the GIA's own words, "he taught European jewelry manufacturing techniques to Native American craftsmen." Supplee wasn't the only one in that circle (Charles Loloma, Harvey Begay, and Larry Golsh are named alongside him), but he became one of the clearest carriers of what Touraine taught: three-dimensional design and fine diamond setting. So the "French" in Charles Supplee isn't a passport stamp — it's a direct line to 1930s Paris goldsmithing, handed to him at a bench in Arizona.
He also works in bronze sculpture, photography, and painting.
Supplee's jewelry combines forging, engraving, etching, casting, fabrication, and diamond-setting — a fuller construction kit than traditional silver-and-turquoise work uses — aimed at pieces that stand up off the hand and move. He favors 14k and 18k gold set with turquoise (including Morenci), coral, sugilite, and lapis, and he doesn't sketch first. "The more techniques you learn," he has said, "the less inhibited you are and the more freedom you have with what you want to make." Some pieces carry recurring Hopi-inspired decorative motifs — a corn design, a four-directions pattern — worked as ornament, in his own vocabulary.
Supplee's work was shown in "Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation" (2002) at New York's American Craft Museum and "Jewels of the Southwest" (2002) in New Mexico, and appears in the standard reference shelf of the field — the Jackas' Beyond Tradition and Art of the Hopi, Dexter Cirillo's Southwestern Indian Jewelry, and Lois Dubin's North American Indian Jewelry and Adornment. He passed the craft to his younger brother Don Supplee, who apprenticed under him for three years before building his own career.
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