Allen Kee — Navajo Silversmith & His Hallmarks

Allen Kee. Navajo (Diné), 1916–1972. Kenneth Begay's cousin, and one of the two hands the White Hogan was built on.

Every famous shop has a name over the door and the hands that actually built its reputation. At Scottsdale's White Hogan — the shop that did as much as any to carry Navajo silver into the modern era — one of those hands belonged to Allen Kee. He was there at the start, one of its two original silversmiths, and he made most of the molds the shop's cast silver was poured from. Much of what collectors know as the White Hogan look began as a form Allen Kee carved.

The Marks

Kee's work carries a conjoined "AK" alongside the White Hogan's own domed-hogan shop stamp and "HAND MADE STERLING." The pairing matters for the collector: the shop mark places the piece at the White Hogan, and the "AK" identifies the hand — a two-part signature typical of the shop-and-smith system that governed White Hogan output.

The Smith

He was born in 1916, first cousin to Kenneth Begay — the man widely called the father of modern Navajo silverwork — and the two worked the same shop at the same formative moment. Kee was one of the two original silversmiths at the White Hogan (the Bonnell family's Scottsdale shop), and the shop's own history credits him specifically with cutting most of its sand-cast molds — the master forms that gave the White Hogan its consistent, architectural line. To make the molds is to set the shape of everything cast from them; Kee's influence runs through pieces that never carried his mark.

The Work

Kee worked in sand-casting and favored structured cuffs — split-shank and multi-bar forms with the clean, weighted geometry the White Hogan became known for. With his brother George Kee and his cousin Kenneth Begay, he is credited with developing the "five-bar bracelet," a design that reads as pure structure: parallel bars of silver held in balance, no ornament doing the work that form should. It is of a piece with the whole White Hogan project — modern, restrained, built rather than decorated.

The Standing

Kee's standing rests on the White Hogan itself: to be one of its two founding smiths, and the maker of its molds, is to sit near the source of modern Navajo silver's most influential shop. (One dealer lists a LACMA holding; a direct search of the museum's own collection returned nothing under his name, so we leave that claim out rather than repeat it unverified.) His clearest monument is the shop's body of work — and the cousin, Kenneth Begay, whose name the era remembers and whose bench Kee shared.