Yazzie Johnson (Diné, b. 1946) and Gail Bird (Santo Domingo/Laguna Pueblo, b. 1949). Two hands, one piece — for more than half a century.
Most jewelry in this directory is the work of a single maker. This page is for two. Yazzie Johnson and Gail Bird met as children in 1960 at a boarding school in Utah, where both their parents worked — he was fourteen, she was twelve. The friendship never broke. In 1972 it became a working partnership, and more than fifty years later it still is: Bird designs, Johnson fabricates, and neither piece nor credit is ever split between them. It's one of the longest and most celebrated collaborations in Native American jewelry.
Johnson was born in 1946 in Winslow, Arizona, to a Navajo family; he served in the U.S. Army in Germany and Vietnam before studying at UC Berkeley and the University of Colorado. His first brush with metal came at the Inter-Mountain Indian School from Dooley D. Shorty — a silversmith and Navajo Code Talker who taught there — the earliest thread of the fabrication side he'd later lead. Bird was born in 1949 in Oakland, daughter of a Santo Domingo (Kewa) father and a Laguna Pueblo mother, and studied art at the same two universities. Neither trained through a formal apprenticeship; in their respective specialties, both are self-taught. They live and work in Ojo Caliente, New Mexico.
Their signature is the thematic belt — not the traditional stamped concho belt, but a buckle-and-conchos set built around a single narrative idea. They've made one every year for Santa Fe Indian Market since 1979, with titles like "Route 66/Tourism" and "All Things Hopi." Their design vocabulary is drawn from ancient rock-art imagery — pictographs and petroglyphs of the Southwest — expanded rather than copied. As they put it: "We see our jewelry as being very traditional in nature. But we carry the traditions further… The symbols and narrative on our pieces are expansions of traditional symbols and stories."
The technique that best captures how they think is their "underlay" — engraved scenes worked on the reverse, unseen face of a buckle, clasp, or bezel. It descends directly from Charles Loloma's idea of setting precious stone on the hidden inside of a ring: beauty the wearer knows is there even when no one else can see it. Johnson tufa-casts their gold and sets it with sawtooth bezels, and the materials range far past turquoise and coral into druzy quartz, ammonite, dinosaur bone, petrified pinecone, Yowah opal, labradorite, and South Sea keshi pearls — often paired asymmetrically, two mismatched stones balanced by the reach of the gold around them.
The mark has changed over the decades, and knowing which is which matters — their dealer of forty-plus years, Martha Struever, has written specifically to correct market misattributions. Johnson first stamped a "Y" in 1973; in 1983 the pair introduced a "G/Y" mark — a "G" curled almost into a circle around a "Y." The current mark has evolved again. Because pieces have been wrongly attributed to them for sale, verify the hallmark carefully.
Johnson and Bird won Best of Show at Santa Fe Indian Market in 1981. Their work is held by the Smithsonian, the British Museum, the National Museums of Scotland, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Heard Museum — which has built a holding of some twenty-five of their works. In 2007 the Heard's chief curator, Diana Pardue, published the first monograph on them, Shared Images: The Innovative Jewelry of Yazzie Johnson and Gail Bird (Museum of New Mexico Press), with a foreword by Struever — the kind of book-length, museum-press treatment reserved for artists the field considers essential.
Know more about Yazzie? Contact T.Skies.