Harvey Begay — Diné Silversmith & His Mark

Harvey Austin Begay, c. 1938 – 2009. Tuba City, Arizona. The fighter pilot who came home to silver.

Before Harvey Begay was a jeweler, he landed F-4 Phantoms on aircraft carriers. Son of the most important Navajo silversmith of the century, he took an aerospace degree instead of the bench, flew combat over Vietnam as a fighter officer, and became a production test pilot — the man who takes a brand-new fighter up to find out what breaks. In 1968 one broke: he ejected from a malfunctioning Phantom and survived. A couple of years later he walked away from aviation, went home to the Navajo Nation, and picked up his father's trade. The precision that put a jet on a carrier deck two hundred and thirty times is the same precision you see in the architectural line of his silver.

The Smith

He was born in Tuba City around 1938, son of Kenneth Begay — "the Father of Modern Navajo Jewelry," and an artist already in this directory — and Eleanor Begay, an accomplished weaver. He apprenticed in his father's shop through high school and college, when Kenneth was a partner at Scottsdale's White Hogan. But he took his own road first: a Bachelor of Science from Arizona State in 1961, a commission as a U.S. Navy flight officer flying F-4s off the U.S.S. Midway, then a test-pilot job with McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis.

Around 1970 he left it all to re-examine his Navajo heritage, and settled in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. The break that made him an artist in his own right came in 1972, when he began a formal apprenticeship with the French master jeweler Pierre Touraine — the same Old World goldsmith who trained a generation of Southwestern jewelers — learning European diamond-setting and lost-wax casting. Harvey was blunt about why it mattered: "At first I was heavily influenced by my father, but I knew I had to change that… Now I feel that my pieces are a bridge between the old and the new." By the end of the decade he was showing in Scottsdale under the gallerist Lovena Ohl, in the same room as Charles Loloma and Larry Golsh.

The Work

Begay's jewelry is a blend of traditional Navajo form and hard modern precision — classic silver-and-turquoise rooted in the old ways, and bold gold-and-diamond pieces built with finely engineered texture, rough surfaces played against polished ones, motifs repeated in rhythm. He was among the first to push lost-wax casting to extreme fine detail, and he tufa-cast as well, working silver and 14k gold with Nevada turquoise, coral, and diamonds. His designs drew on Navajo figures — the Yei, the Four Directions, First Man and First Woman — and on feather patterns taken from ancient Mimbres pottery. He also honored his father directly, recreating some of Kenneth's designs in his own hand. (We name the Yei as his galleries do; the meaning of such figures belongs to the Diné, and we leave it there.)

The Mark

Begay signed with his own hallmark — documented as "HB" and cataloged by dealers under his full name, Harvey Austin Begay. One dealer notes it echoes his father's mark in feeling; but it is his own, cataloged separately from Kenneth's — a son's signature, not a borrowed one.

The Standing

Harvey Begay was named an Arizona Indian Living Treasure in 2005, and Arizona State University endowed the Harvey A. Begay Memorial Scholarship in his name to help Native undergraduates. In his lifetime he was counted among the museum-quality tier of the Scottsdale scene — featured in National Geographic in 1981 alongside Loloma and Golsh — a jeweler whose work, like the man, moved between worlds. He died in Steamboat Springs on March 2, 2009.