The School for American Craftsmen, founded by Aileen Osborn Webb in 1944, trained many talented and successful makers in the postwar years. None had a more fascinating career than Charles Loloma. Born to a Hopi family in Arizona, he had already trained as a muralist and served in the Army Corps of Engineers by the time he came to study on the GI Bill. Loloma initially focused on ceramics, but in the 1950s began to develop a line of abstract jewelry, drawing from Pueblo traditions in some (but not all) of his techniques and his material palette.
These choices tactically positioned him as a representative of Native culture who was also in dialogue with modernism. “Indians are coming to be a fad,” he once said, “as though the Indian should not grow up. But we have. And the work is flowering—even surpassing some [other] contemporary work which has reached a point where it is no longer a growing thing.”¹
¹ Jayne Linderman, “Loloma: Stone, Bone, Silver, and Gold,” Craft Horizons 34, no. 1 (February 1974): 24.