b. May 25, 1948, Winslow, Arizona. Two pueblos in one hand.
Howard Sice was born to a Hopi mother and a Laguna father, and raised across both worlds — home base on the Laguna Pueblo, in the village of Paraje, but season after season spent with aunts in the Hopi villages of Walpi, Kykotsmovi, and Polacca. Dealers who've handled his work for decades all say the same thing: you can see both cultures in the jewelry. His whole career is the art of a man who belongs to two pueblos and lets each one into the silver.
He came to jewelry the long way around. Sice served twenty years in the United States Air Force, including Vietnam, and earned a Bachelor of Science in Human Resources Management along the way. He began making jewelry in 1972, while still in uniform — and taught himself, with no named master, in traditional silver and goldsmithing. The turn that made his name came in 1985, when he added engraving to his repertoire. That's the year, as one longtime dealer puts it, the work became unmistakably "a Sice Design."
Sice is an engraver first — his signature is hand stamping, scoring, and fine engraving, not casting or channel inlay. Adobe Gallery describes one of his bracelets, a sun framed by feathers, as "meticulously stamped and scored," and calls that control "a hallmark of Sice's ability to transform silver into detailed works of art." He also works as a kind of translator of the deep past: he'll take a design off an ancient pottery shard or a petroglyph and engrave it, at its exact size and shape, onto a silver pin or pendant. His stone-set pieces pair that engraved silver with cabochon turquoise, azurite, and Montana banded agate.
He's also a restless technician. In recent years he moved much of his work to Argentium sterling — a silver-germanium alloy that stays bright and resists tarnish — and has experimented with niobium and precious-metal clay, carved and then fired onto metal. His range runs past jewelry entirely: he designed four water-acoustic vessels for Phoenix's Squaw Peak Parkway (1992) and a hundred street medallions for the city's Central Avenue beautification project (1990).
This is one of the better-documented hallmarks in the directory. Sice stamps "Sice Sterling" on the back of his work — a mark that two independent galleries, Adobe and Medicine Man, have both photographed and published in their hallmark references. On pieces made in registered Argentium silver, you'll also find the trademarked "flying unicorn" Argentium stamp — that one marks the alloy, not the maker, so don't mistake it for a second signature.
Sice took Best of Show at the Museum of Northern Arizona's Hopi Show in both 1990 and 1999, Best of Show at the Sharlot Hall Museum (1999), and a First Place at the Heard Museum. Arizona named him to a Governor's Arts Award in 1993, and the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA) recognized him as a Master Artist and Fellowship recipient. He shows regularly at Santa Fe Indian Market, and his work has been exhibited at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and the Arizona State Museum.
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