Gerald Lomaventema — Hopi Silversmith & His Mark

Gerald (Honwytewa) Lomaventema. Shungopavi, Second Mesa. The smith who teaches in Hopi.

Ask Gerald Lomaventema what makes a good piece of jewelry and he won't start with silver. "You have to make jewelry that makes sense," he tells his apprentices. "You have to make jewelry that has a meaning." He means it literally: he teaches his students in the Hopi language, because he believes the craft can't be separated from the culture that made it — and the culture rides on the words. His work carries that conviction into the metal.

The Smith

He was born into the Bear Clan of Shungopavi, on Second Mesa, and long worked under the name Gerald Honwytewa; Margaret Nickelson Wright's register of Hopi smiths lists him under that name, Bear clan, Shungopavi (Wright 2003, p. 98). Since 2005 he has worked as Lomaventema. Galleries often list him under both names to bridge the two eras of his work.

His first lesson came the way many do on the mesas: watching his father, Jerry Honwytewa, do overlay when he was a boy. The formal training came at nineteen, through the Hopi Silvercraft Cooperative Guild in Second Mesa. That Guild is worth knowing about — it was founded after World War II by Fred Kabotie and Paul Saufkie so that Hopi men coming home from military service could learn silvercraft and stay on the reservation for the year-round ceremonial cycle, instead of leaving for city work. It was cultural preservation built as a trade school. Kabotie, who co-developed the Hopi overlay technique itself, was Lomaventema's own great-uncle — a fact he says he only fully grasped later in life. He is a member of that original Co-op Guild, and a founding link to its successor, the Qwa-Holo Hopi Silvercraft Guild.

The Work

Lomaventema works traditional Hopi overlay — a design sawn from one sheet of silver and soldered over a second, the recessed background oxidized dark so the pattern reads sharp — and in 2001 he added tufa casting, using volcanic ash from the Hopi Reservation. He builds much of his own toolkit: dental instruments reground into fine steel "rakes" for texturing lines, the arch of a bowling ball used to bend a silver plate into a true curve. His bolo ties, concho belts, and cuffs, often accented with 14k gold and set with coral, ironwood, and turquoise, are recognizable enough that collectors say it on sight — "Oh, that's a Lomaventema."

His designs come from life on Second Mesa — kachina dances, nearby petroglyphs, corn planting, prayers for rain. We describe these as the sources he and his galleries name publicly, and leave their ceremonial meaning to Lomaventema and the Hopi people; some of what stands behind this work is kept private, as it should be.

The Standing

In 2014 Lomaventema won Best in Jewelry at Santa Fe Indian Market for a concho belt — the milestone win of his career in a famously fierce category — along with Best of Category at the Gallup Inter-Tribal Ceremonial that same year, and First Place at the Eiteljorg Museum Indian Market in 2013. In 2016 he received a Southwest Folklife Alliance Master-Apprentice Artist Award, which he spent on tools and materials for his own apprentices. He demonstrates regularly at the Museum of Northern Arizona's Hopi Heritage Festival and at Tucson Meet Yourself, and travels to the Hopi & Zuni Artist Show in Japan. But the work he seems proudest of is the teaching — the apprentices, in the language, carrying it forward.