Cippy Crazyhorse — Cochiti Pueblo Silversmith & His Marks

Cipriano Quintana, b. 1946, Cochiti Pueblo. The middle of a three-generation line.

Cippy Crazyhorse makes silver that looks a hundred years old the day it leaves his bench — heavy, hand-stamped, clean of any decoration it doesn't need. That's not an accident of style; it's a lineage. He works the classic Pueblo tradition his parents worked before him, and his son works after him.

The Marks

Crazyhorse signs his work "CZH," and also with two back-to-back C's, alongside a STERLING stamp. (Adobe Gallery has captured his hallmark on documented pieces — a good reference for identifying his hand.)

The Smith

He was born Cipriano Quintana in 1946 at Cochiti Pueblo, into a silversmithing family that mattered. His father, Joe H. Quintana, was called by one gallery "one of the finest silversmiths of his generation." His mother, Teresita, was a renowned jeweler in her own right.

Cippy came to the bench late, and by hard luck. He studied at Eastern New Mexico University, served in the Navy until 1972, and was working as an electrician's assistant on the construction of the Cochiti Dam when a workplace injury in 1974 ended that work. In his own telling, the injury "forced his hand at silversmithing." He started small — making silver chain — and taught himself the old Pueblo way, with steady encouragement from his father and his wife, Susan. He has made jewelry every year since.

His son, Waddie Crazyhorse, is a respected working jeweler today — making the Quintanas a three-generation Cochiti line: Joe to Cippy to Waddie.

The Work

Crazyhorse's trademark is weight — thick-gauge silver worked with deep stamp-and-chisel. Much of that silver he pours himself, melting scrap into ingots the way, he says, "the old timers" did. His forms are the traditional Pueblo vocabulary — cuff bracelets, concha belts, ranger-set buckles, bead necklaces — built with antique stamps and early techniques so that the finished piece reads, as Adobe Gallery puts it, "clean and uncluttered" with "a look of being incredibly old." It's a deliberate effect: contemporary work made to hold the weight of the classic era.

He is precise about where he stands in the craft. "There are traditional classic styles in silver jewelry, the Navajo and the Pueblo," he has said, "and I do the latter." His work carries no pictorial or narrative iconography — it is the pure Pueblo silver form.

The Standing

Over more than thirty-five years at Santa Fe Indian Market, Crazyhorse has taken numerous ribbons, and has served as a jewelry judge there himself. In 1990 he co-curated the exhibition "Steady Hands, White Metal" at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe with fellow jeweler Yazzie Johnson. The Santa Fean named him one of Indian Market's "Seven Standouts" in 2008, and his classic Cochiti work has a devoted following in Japan.