Denise Wallace — Chugach Sugpiaq Jeweler & Her Mark

Denise Wallace, b. 1957, Seattle. Chugach Sugpiaq (Alutiiq). The jeweler whose work opens.

Denise Wallace makes jewelry that transforms — literally. A brooch is a mask whose face swings open on a tiny hinge to reveal another face beneath. A belt comes apart into a row of figures, each one its own small story, each wearable on its own. Doors, latches, hidden compartments, moving parts: her signature motif is transformation, and she has said the doors are based on traditional masks — "a way to show the transformation of the inner spirit of an animal, person, or object." It's the rare artist whose subject and whose whole life are the same word.

The Smith

She was born Denise Hottinger in Seattle in 1957, Chugach Sugpiaq — of the Prince William Sound communities of Tatitlek and Cordova (the press often calls her "Chugach Aleut," a looser market term). After high school she spent time in Alaska with her grandmother, studied lapidary and silverwork in Seattle, and then made a crossing that defines her: at nineteen she went to the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe — the Southwest — and earned her fine-arts degree there in 1981. She credits Native artists including the Aleut sculptor John Hoover and the Hopi jeweler Charles Loloma among her influences. An Alaska Native artist, trained in the desert, who turned the craft back toward the Arctic.

The work was a shared life. In 1982 she married Samuel Wallace, and for nearly three decades they made jewelry together as one hand — Samuel the lapidary, cutting stone and ivory into miniature carved figures; Denise the metalsmith, scrimshaw artist, and researcher who grounded every piece in Alaska Native story. The Smithsonian's retrospective of their work is billed for them both. After Samuel's death in 2010 the studio stayed in the family: their son David took over the lapidary bench, and their daughter Dawn, a jeweler in her own right, shares Denise's studio today. The Wallaces worked out of Santa Fe for over twenty years before moving to the Big Island of Hawaii in 1999.

The Work

Wallace builds in sterling silver and 14k gold set with fossilized walrus, mammoth, and mastodon ivory — much of it scrimshawed, incised with fine ink-filled line to render a face — along with coral and semiprecious stone. Her most celebrated pieces are large narrative belts assembled from individually removable figures: the Crossroads of Continents Belt, a Yup'ik Dancer belt of ten dancers set among ten masks. Her recurring imagery draws on Yup'ik, Athabascan, and her own Chugach/Sugpiaq Arctic traditions — a "Woman in the Moon" whose two sides read smiling and sorrowing, walrus and seal, and mask forms including a piece she identifies as a Yup'ik Tunghak mask, a named figure from Yup'ik ceremonial masking tradition. We name these as she and her galleries do; their ceremonial meaning belongs to the Yup'ik people, and her own Sugpiaq tradition is related to but distinct from them — we don't collapse the two. In her words: "My work is a direct reflection on my home, my ancestors, and my connection to the world."

The Standing

In 2006 the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian mounted Arctic Transformations: The Jewelry of Denise and Samuel Wallace — a twenty-five-year retrospective of some 150 works, organized by the Anchorage Museum. Her jewelry is held in the permanent collections of the Anchorage Museum, the Institute of American Indian Arts, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, and the Mingei International Museum in San Diego, and she was featured in PBS's Craft in America. She remains a decorated presence at Santa Fe Indian Market and the Heard Museum Guild's competition, where her belts and bolos have taken top honors into the 2020s.