b. July 19, 1955, Shungopavi, Second Mesa. Snow Clan. The overlay master who works without a pattern.
Jason Takala doesn't draw the design onto the silver and follow the line. He cuts it freehand, from his head, no template — every curve of a Man in the Maze sawn out by eye. "I take my direction from the silver," he says. "In a sense, it talks to me." That's the thing that sets his overlay apart in a tradition where most artists work from a set pattern: Takala's pieces are one-offs by method, not just by hand.
He was born in 1955 in Shungopavi, on Second Mesa — the same village where Hopi overlay itself was born — into the Snow Clan. The art showed early and stubbornly. Sent to high school in Woodstock, Vermont, he found the dorm walls bare and painted a mural across one: a landscape cut by a waterfall, framed. The school was impressed enough to add art classes to his schedule. It was, he'd later say, his first real attempt at painting.
His way into silver ran through family. He started by designing for his maternal uncle, Bernard Dawahoya — a leading Hopi Silvercraft Cooperative Guild silversmith, and himself an artist in this directory — and learned the overlay craft through the Hopi Arts Guild. That places Takala one step down a direct line from the Guild that Fred Kabotie and Paul Saufkie founded in 1949 to teach the cut-and-solder overlay technique. In the 1980s he moved to Old Oraibi, where his wife Margie grew up. "After that I really started creating," he says. "Everything is so calm there, your mind goes to a different level. It all came to me then."
Takala works double overlay — a design hand-cut from a top sheet of sterling or gold and soldered over a second sheet oxidized dark, so the pattern stands out bright against a black ground — but the cutting is entirely freehand, without a predetermined pattern. His best-known motif is the Man in the Maze, the Hopi migration symbol of man emerging from the center of the earth and moving out in four directions, and his vocabulary runs through the traditional Hopi overlay imagery of whirlwind, rain, cloud, lightning, and prayer feather — symbols of migration, weather, and renewal. Once he had the foundation mastered he pushed into more abstract designs drawn from ancient pottery and textiles, and he keeps a distinctive sideline going: silver "pottery" — overlay bowls, lidded vessels, and seed jars raised in metal in the shape of Hopi ceramics.
Takala works in both sterling and 14k gold, and dealers who've carried his work for decades regard him as one of the most sought-after Hopi overlay jewelers — several call him, plainly, a master (specific competition honors aren't itemized in the public record, so we let the standing speak for itself). His jewelry has been shown in "Jewels of the Southwest" at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe. And the line continues: his son, Jason Takala Jr., is a working Hopi overlay silversmith carrying the family name into a second generation.
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