Ivan Tillotson — Diné / Yuki Silversmith & His Mark

Navajo on his mother's side, Yuki on his father's. Covelo, California and Pine Hill, New Mexico. The apprentice who became house family.

Ivan Tillotson met his teacher by accident. His girlfriend is Ronald Tom's niece; one day Ivan helped Tom move a heavy machine, and Tom asked him, out of nowhere, "Do you want to learn jewelry?" That was 2022, and Ivan was a beginner. Two years later he's a T.Skies in-house jeweler, and the whole climb is on our own footage — from a first, nearly-sold-out show of sixty-five-dollar stamped pieces to cuffs with synclastic doming and hand-built chain. Watching Ivan Tillotson learn in public is one of the better things this directory can point you to.

The Smith

He carries two nations, and he'll tell you which parts of his work come from which. From his mother's side he's Navajo, out of the Ramah community at Pine Hill, New Mexico. From his father's side he's Yuki — a Native Californian people of the Round Valley, at Covelo, where he grew up "coastal Yuki," fishing and gigging for salmon. His father passed when Ivan was seven, and he's plain about what that shaped: raised by his mother and sisters, he says the respect for women that runs through his early jewelry comes straight from them. His uncle, nicknamed Snapper, taught him beadwork as a boy in California; he graduated from Albuquerque's Native American Community Academy; and he learned silver at Ronald Tom's bench — stampwork, soldering bead-shot cups, the spacer-counting tricks — before growing into his own hand.

The Work

Tillotson's iconography is mostly his own invention, and it reads like his life. Fish and water and zigzag waves come from the salmon coast of his father's people — "Everything I make, that's a fish," his young daughter tells him. A hummingbird is his grandmother, who loved them; a pine-cone charm is piñon-gathering as a kid; there's even a basketball stud set from his own playing days. His technique has grown fast and visibly: from basic symmetric stampwork and adjustable shanks to synclastic and anticlastic doming, overlay, handmade sterling chain with hand-closed jump rings, and picture-frame settings topped with little three-dimensional turtles and bears. He sets a widening bench of stone — Royston and Kingman turquoise, spiny oyster, Wild Horse magnesite (which, he notes, comes from California too), jade, labradorite, white buffalo — and signs his work simply, "Ivan."

In Motion

Start at his very first guest show on T.Skies — his debut as a working artist, where he tells his own story, heritage and all — then watch how far the hand travels by his third.