Mark Chee — Navajo Silversmith of the Santa Fe Trading Era
Name-card placeholder — hallmark imagery to follow. © Turquoise Skies Inc.
Diné (Navajo) · 1914 – 1981 · Active 1934–1942 and 1945–1970s
The marks
Hougart's reference documents two marks for Mark Chee:
- chee — the word, set inside a bird figure. An early mark, dating to about 1946–48, when Chee had resumed work after World War II. It's documented on a copper dish that also carries a UITA 12 stamp — the trader-certification stamp assigned to Packard's Chaparral Trading Post in Santa Fe, where Chee worked in the late 1940s. The UITA stamp program itself began in mid-1946, which is what pins the date.
- M. CHEE in block letters. Hougart gives no date range for this one.
Collector's caution. Two traps here. First, the M. CHEE mark is undated in the reference literature — don't let a seller pin a decade on it that the books don't support. Second, a connection you may see in catalogs and listings: Mark Chee working for Frank Patania's Thunderbird Shop. We can find no source for it. Hougart's Thunderbird Shop entry lists the silversmiths who worked there, and Chee is not among them; his documented Santa Fe employers are Southwest Arts & Crafts, Packard's, and the Wooden Indian Trading Post. Two great Santa Fe names, but not the same bench. Note also that Mark was the younger brother of silversmith Joe Chee — worth remembering when a piece is attributed only by surname.
The old style, on demand
Mark Chee's working life ran through the era when Southwest silver became an institution: trained in the silversmithing program at the Santa Fe Indian School, active from 1934, and employed across the very trading posts and curio houses that carried Navajo work to the world. In the 1930s he was at Southwest Arts & Crafts — Julius Gans's Santa Fe shop, a major wholesale supplier in the Fred Harvey years — where the roster around him reads like a generation's honor roll: Joe H. Quintana, Silviano Quintana, Ambrose Roanhorse, Sam Roanhorse, David Taliman. His record goes quiet from 1942 to 1945 — Hougart's footnote alludes to Chee resuming work "after WWII," which suggests war service, though no source says so outright. After the war came Packard's Chaparral Trading Post in the late 1940s, and later the Wooden Indian Trading Post under Art Rogers.
He worked in silver and copper — repoussé, inset nuggets, chisel work — across multiple styles and jewelry types. But the story that fixes him best comes from a 1976 collector's interview: a gallery owner, stuck with a contemporary squash-blossom necklace of poor design but good Lander turquoise, handed it to Mark Chee to rework "in an old style." The bracelets and rings that came back were, in the owner's words, "simply stunning." That was Chee's reputation in a sentence — the smith you trusted to turn mediocre modern work back into the real thing.
The instinct carried forward. Mike Bird-Romero (Ohkay Owingeh), a multiple award winner at Santa Fe Indian Market, named Mark Chee alongside Julian Lovato as an early influence in his turn away from Loloma-era contemporary style toward classic traditional imagery and stampwork. Chee's conservatism wasn't nostalgia; it was a standard, and it outlived him.
References
- Hougart, Bille. Native American and Southwestern Silver Hallmarks, 5th ed. (2022), Names section (Chee entries incl. footnote 18), Timeline, and the Southwest Arts & Crafts, Packard's Chaparral Trading Post, and Thunderbird Shop entries.
- Rosnek, Carl & Stacey, Joseph. Skystone and Silver: The Collector's Book of Southwest Indian Jewelry (1976), gallery-interview passage on the reworked squash-blossom commission.