Diego Cruz. A T.Skies bench artist working a contemporary Southwestern-minimalist line — shaped less by a long lineage than by the makers at the next bench.
Some silversmiths carry a technique handed down five generations. Diego Cruz came to his the modern way — at the T.Skies bench, learning beside the artists around him and pulling as readily from film and video games as from the Southwestern tradition in the room. His work is a fusion: the pared-down instinct of minimalism laid over Southwestern form. He builds by subtraction — taking a shape down to what it actually needs.
We don't have a documented hallmark on record for Diego, so we won't invent one. His pieces are identified as T.Skies bench work and by that contemporary minimalist-Southwestern hand. (Hold a marked piece of his? That's exactly the first-hand detail this directory is built to capture.)
Diego Cruz is a staff jewelry artist at T.Skies — one of the makers at our own bench. He's open about where his eye comes from: film, video games, and the artists working next to him, including the guest artists who pass through the T.Skies Live Shows. It's a contemporary artist's formation — influence gathered from the world around him and the bench beside him, rather than handed down a single family line. He is featured here as a T.Skies maker, in our own footage.
Diego's line is a contemporary Southwestern-minimalist fusion — traditional Southwestern vocabulary stripped toward the clean and the essential. Where a lot of the work in this tradition builds outward — more stone, more stamp, more silver — his instinct runs the other way: pare it back until the form carries itself. It's a modern sensibility applied to an old regional language, and it reads as his own.
Meet Diego at the bench, in our footage:
Know more about Diego? Contact T.Skies.