Jesse Lee Monongya, 1952–2024. The man who put the night sky inside a bear.
Jesse Monongya learned the night sky before he ever learned silver. Raised by Navajo relatives in the Chuska Mountains near Two Grey Hills — in a traditional hogan, by a grandmother who taught him the prayers, the four sacred colors, and the constellations — he carried those lessons to a bench he wouldn't find until he was a grown man. When he did, they came out as his signature: a bear form with a whole starfield inlaid into its body, coral sunsets shading down into lapis nights. The imagery was his own biography, set in stone.
Monongya signed his work "MONONGYA," stamped into the metal in a stylized block hand (documented signature at Adobe Gallery). One thing collectors should know, because the trade record itself preserves it: his father, the tufa-casting master Preston Monongye, spelled the family name Monongye — Jesse deliberately changed his own to Monongya. Both spellings ran in print during their lifetimes. It's not an error to correct; it's two men, two hands, two marks.
He was born August 13, 1952, in Phoenix, and separated young from his birth family — raised, with a brother and sister, by adoptive Navajo relatives. As a child he did not know his father was Preston Monongye, one of the most celebrated Native jewelers of the century. He graduated Fort Wingate High School, worked heavy equipment, and served in the U.S. Marine Corps in Vietnam. He met his father for the first time at about twenty-one.
Even then, jewelry didn't come at once. By his own account, he started after a dream in which his birth mother appeared and told him he would become a famous jeweler — "it was like a lightning bolt hit me." From 1975 to 1977 he apprenticed at Preston's Paradise Valley studio, and their split of labor tells you exactly what Jesse became: Preston did the metalwork, Jesse did the stone inlay. He sharpened the lapidary side by watching Lee Yazzie — Preston's other great inlay collaborator — and worked in view of Charles Loloma and Dennis Edaakie. His first independent piece, a bear pendant, won Best of Jewelry at the 1977 Hopi Marketplace in Flagstaff. The bear became his life's motif.
He served as Artist in Residence at the Heard Museum (1986–87) and on the U.S. Indian Arts and Crafts Board. He died August 6, 2024, at seventy-one.
Monongya worked stone-to-stone inlay — precision-cut stones set directly against one another, no channel walls of metal between them, so the color runs together like paint. Dealers call it "painterly," and the description is earned: a single piece moves from coral through turquoise into a jet-black sky studded with opal moons and lapis stars, the whole scene set into 14k or 18k gold. His material bench was deep — Acoma jet, sugilite, coral, turquoise, lapis, opal, malachite, shell, fossilized ivory, and in later ranger sets, diamonds.
He was plain about where the work came from. "When I first started making jewelry," he said, "I reached back to my grandmother's teachings about the prayers and the four sacred colors… I would dream the colors, and I would wake up in the middle of the night and draw it out." The night-sky bear isn't a style he picked. It's the hogan he was raised in.
Some of his bear-and-landscape pieces incorporate Yei figures, and a documented three-generation family piece — Preston, Jesse, and Jesse's son Bo — depicts a Long Hair Katsina. We name these as the jewelry-trade record does, and leave their sacred meaning to the Hopi and Diné people and to the artists' own words.
Monongya's work is held at the Heard Museum, the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, the Denver Art Museum, the Museum of Northern Arizona, Cooper Hewitt, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others. He took Best of Division at Santa Fe Indian Market in 1992 and 1994 (the years both major sources agree on), among many other awards across four decades of shows. His work is the subject of a dedicated monograph — Lois Sherr Dubin's Jesse Monongya: Opal Bears and Lapis Skies (Hudson Hills, 2002), 175 color plates — and the tradition continues in his son Bo Monongye.
Know more about Jesse? Contact T.Skies.