b. 1941, Zuni Pueblo. The Zuni jeweler whose work doesn't look Zuni — on purpose.
Say "Zuni jewelry" and most people picture the tradition Roger Tsabetsaye's own sister mastered: tight needlepoint and petit-point, dozens of small stones set in careful clusters. Roger went the other way. He was one of the first students through the door at the Institute of American Indian Arts, studied under the man who was rewriting what Native jewelry could be, and came out making Zuni work that looks like almost no one else's — sculptural, raised, modern. In a family that held the tradition, he chose to break from it.
He was born in 1941 at Zuni Pueblo. Jewelry was already in the household — his sister, Edith Tsabetsaye, who became internationally known for her fine Zuni needlepoint, learned silversmithing and lapidary from their parents as a girl. When the Institute of American Indian Arts opened in Santa Fe in 1962, Roger was among its very first students, and there he studied jewelry under Charles Loloma — the Hopi master then teaching at the school, whose sculptural, unconventional designs were pulling Native jewelry away from its established forms. That teacher-student line is the key to everything Roger made after: dealers who handle his work say plainly it "doesn't look like typical Zuni jewelry," and the reason is Loloma.
He was a painter, too — his early modernist work was surveyed decades later in the Smithsonian-cataloged exhibition Action/Abstraction Redefined, a look back at Native modernism of the 1940s through 1970s.
Tsabetsaye's signature is raised inlay — stones and shaped metal set proud of the surface rather than ground flush, so the piece reads as a small sculpture rather than a smooth field. He works in both silver and gold, setting turquoise, coral, and lapis, and the whole sensibility is closer to Loloma's dimensional, non-traditional approach than to the flatter clusterwork most associated with his pueblo. It's Zuni by hand and heritage, modernist by training.
Around 1968 Tsabetsaye was named Artist of the Year by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board of the U.S. Department of the Interior — a national recognition, and an early one, coming only about six years after he first picked up the craft. A silver coffee pot he made in 1965 is held today in the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, acquired originally by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board and transferred to the museum in 2000. He carried Zuni work to national art events with the Zuni Craftsmen Cooperative Association, one of the pueblo's historic artisan cooperatives.
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