Julian Lovato — Kewa (Santo Domingo) Silversmith & His Mark

Julian Lovato, 1925–2018. Kewa Pueblo. The man they trusted to keep the Thunderbird.

When the Thunderbird Shop in Santa Fe closed its doors in 1964, someone had to be trusted with its hallmark — the mark that stood for Frank Patania Sr., the Italian-born master who had brought a modernist eye to Southwestern silver. That trust went to Julian Lovato. Patania's widow, Aurora, gave him the thunderbird stamp (Hougart 2020, p. 54), and Lovato became known in the trade as the "Keeper of the Thunderbird." It's a fitting title for a man whose whole body of work was about carrying a tradition forward while making it new.

The Smith

He was born in 1925 at Kewa (Santo Domingo) Pueblo — the New Mexico pueblo famous above all others for heishi, the fine hand-rolled shell and stone beadwork. His parents were expert heishi makers and jewelers, and they were his first teachers. As a young man he worked at Maisel's trading post in Albuquerque, served in the military, and then found his way to the Thunderbird Shop, where he worked under Frank Patania Sr. and absorbed the modernist design sense that would reshape his own. Later he moved on to Packards, and by the 1970s had set up his own studio back home at Kewa, working closely with his wife, Marie O. Lovato, of Ohkay Owingeh. He died in 2018, and in 2026 the Wheelwright Museum mounted the first solo exhibition ever dedicated to him — Silver Honors Stone — eighty works drawn from museum and private collections. It runs in Santa Fe through October 2026; visit the exhibition.

The Work

Lovato called his signature approach "raised, dimensional jewelry design" — a sculptural, high-relief way of building silver that lifts the metal off the flat and gives it depth. Into it he folded two things that don't obviously belong together: the traditional Kewa design language he grew up with, simplified and modernized, and the clean modernist aesthetic he learned at Patania's bench. He worked heavy, high-grade silver and was exacting about stone, choosing top-quality turquoise and coral for each piece so the setting had something worth showcasing — which is exactly what his museum retrospective's title says: silver honors stone. On pieces made after 1964 you'll find the Thunderbird Shop mark alongside his own, the visible sign of the lineage he was handed.

The Standing

Dealers and curators alike place Lovato in the top rank of twentieth-century Native silversmiths, in the company of Charles Loloma, Kenneth Begay, and Joe H. Quintana — the generation of Pueblo and Diné makers who stepped out as named, independent designers rather than anonymous production hands. The Wheelwright's 2026 exhibition frames his career precisely there, running alongside contemporaries like the Hopi silversmith Lewis Lomay and Cochiti's Joe Quintana — father of Cippy Crazyhorse, whose own page carries the same Patania Thunderbird thread forward in this directory. For a jeweler who spent his life quietly synthesizing the old and the new, it's a late and fitting recognition.