Isaac Coriz. Kewa — Santo Domingo Pueblo. 1977–2022. The youngest of a great inlay family, who made the thunderbird his own.
A mosaic is a picture built from fragments — cut, fitted, and set until the pieces read as one image. Isaac Coriz was born into a family that thought in exactly that language. The youngest of the seven children of Mary Lovato, he learned chainmaking from his grandfather Leo Coriz and heishi from his grandmother Lupita, and out of that inheritance he built a mosaic-inlay hand entirely his own — most recognizably the thunderbird, a motif his mother worked and he carried forward.
We don't have a documented hallmark for Coriz on record — no reference guide catalogs a physical stamp for him — so we won't invent one. His work is identified by its mosaic inlay and its provenance, and by the family whose techniques it carries. (If you hold a Coriz piece with a mark, that's the kind of first-hand detail this directory exists to capture.)
He was Kewa — Santo Domingo Pueblo, born in 1977, the youngest of Mary Lovato's seven children — a family at the center of the pueblo's inlay and heishi tradition. His grandfather Leo Coriz taught him chainmaking; his grandmother Lupita Coriz taught him heishi, the fine hand-rolled shell-and-stone beadwork Santo Domingo is known for. So the craft reached him from both sides and two generations back, and he grew up inside it rather than coming to it. He died in October 2022.
Coriz worked mosaic stone inlay — the Santo Domingo art of cutting and fitting stone into a set image rather than a single cabochon. His signature is the thunderbird, assembled in inlay, a design his mother used before him and that he made a personal mark; it reads as both an inheritance and his own composition. The tradition he worked in is one of patience — heishi and mosaic are measured in the fit of small pieces — and it is the tradition his whole family is known for.
You can watch Isaac at his bench, in our own footage:
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